You might know that a vast portion of my work constitutes the selling of my time to my clients. From support calls, to research, to programming and other diagnostic tasks – most of our business income is from time.
And time, as you know, is the one finite resource that everyone has. It is also one of the hardest to track, and that is not just because I am a professional procrastinator, or like getting distracted by nice shiny things on the web whilst supposing to do work!
Over a year ago, I came across a nifty little tool called SlimTimer. I actually came across this during an online discussion with it’s developer, Richard White, who is a brilliant interface designer and Ruby on Rails guru. I was trying to learn Ruby and…well, that is another story that is outside the scope of this particular blog.
Enough to say, that I signed on for the SlimTimer service back then, and then promptly forgot about it. About a week ago, I rediscovered it again, and decided to start using it properly.
I must say that I am very impressed with the service. It basically runs in a tiny, unobtrusive browser window, and lets you create tasks on the fly and start stop a little timer to record just how long you are spending on those tasks. You can then log onto the SlimTimer website to run various reports and adjust your timesheets so that you know just how much to bill your clients.
The basic service is free. I’ll say that again in case you missed it – Free! That is ZERO cost. Apparently there is a premium service available which lets you backup your data or export to Excel, but get this – YOU get to nominate how much to pay each month of the premium service. Certainly an interesting concept, and I will be keeping my eye on this innovative pricing scheme to see how it all goes.
SlimTimer is highly recommended for anyone who needs to see where their time is going, and for analysing just how you spend your day. Warning – you will be very surprised!
Heads Up: In the next few weeks, I will be talking about another fantastic website, also by Richard White. Currently, I am in the process of setting everything up, and once I have tested it with my clients, I will report back on my findings.
Recent Comments