Jason Champion

Even though new product development doesn’t result in any billable hours, it’s pretty useful to know how you’re spending your time.  It helps with optimizing workflow, planning for schedules and new products, and is pretty good to know overall.  The trouble is, every method I’ve tried has been too annoying and has fizzled out after a bit.

A physical notepad?  Sure, I can carry a notepad with me most of the time, but at some point that’s going to require data entry of some sort.  This has never worked for me for longer than a week.

Excel?  Close, but the fact that it’s a physical file that has to be synchronized across locations and that it’s a little clunky to categorize time has never made this last for more than two weeks.

The only viable solution really would have to be a web-based application.

I asked Google what was available and stumbled into Paymo.  It looks like an ideal solution — the interface is clean and streamlined and it’s easy to enter and categorize time.  They also have an add-on service that lets you send invoices and bill for time spent on projects.  Although I don’t do anything billable right now, it’s pretty nice to have that already in place with the click of a button should I need it in the future.  I’m sure at some point I’ll be doing some product enhancements as contract work, so it’s good to know that issue is already solved when it comes up.

It’s only been a few days, but it feels like I’ll be able to stick with tracking time this way.  With the graphs and pie charts it’s almost fun to update.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 11:02 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.