As a consultant, time is basically what you are selling so the big question is “How much time have I used, and what/who was it for?”
If you were selling sugar, you would know that you’d made 2000 kilos and sold 1743 kilos. Tracking that is easy. You just weigh it, or count the 1 kilo bags or boxes that you load on the lorries. It’s not quite so easy as a consultant. OK, you’ve got a watch and can keep note of the time you spend on things but I believe in letting technology take care of chores whenever possible and, sure enough, there is a plethora of apps that you can use to track your time.
As always, time tracking apps have pros and cons and after a lot of research I decided on Timecamp. This runs on your computer and you can set up projects that you allocate time to. You can manually start & stop it like a stopwatch but what I find useful is that it records the files and applications that I use during the day, as a timeline. At the end of each day I can look back at what I was doing and allocate chunks of time to the various projects. In fact, Timecamp will automatically allocate files that you use to projects, using tags/keywords.
It’s a free application but there’s a pro version that will let you do more advanced things like create invoices for projects and manage teams of users. I chose Timecamp because it’s simple, flexible and adaptable.
Anyway, I must go…. run out of time.
