Save time tracking the time you save

If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Even if you’re not charging for your time by the hour, it’s still good to track where your time and attention goes during the day. Here’s a great little web app that can help you do just that — and it integrates nicely into many different accounting apps out there, as well.

Read on!

Those clever New Zealanders are at it again! Take a look at MinuteDock.com.

MinuteDock is a very well-thought-out web app. It hooks in nicely with various accounting platforms (including Quickbooks Online, Xero, Freshbooks and more). You can log time using many different methods — via text message from your mobile phone, via your browser with the web app, via bookmarklets, via a direct-message to their twitter account, to name a few.

Tracking your time via browser is a snap. You can use twitter-esque #hashtags to delineate between various projects, and the @at-sign makes it easy to differentiate between clients.

Note “meetings” and “admin” above the entry field — those are two #hashtags to be applied to this entry for client @client_1. Makes for very handy tracking!

Next, check out how easy it is to do your invoicing—just a couple of clicks, and voila!

The default settings are almost always exactly what you want, but you can easily go in and override any of them — piece of cake. Instead of cobbling together time-based invoices for hours at a time every week or every month, imagine handling all that in just a few clicks. Whew!

There’s lots more to this little web app, but the final piece I’m going to talk about here is the reporting. Once you’ve been tracking your time for a while, MinuteDock’s reporting feature reveals a host of insights at the click of a button.

You can see not only how much time you’re spending on each client, and how much untracked time you’ve got, but how much time you deviate from your normal billing rate, besides. Very nice!

MinuteDock — great time-tracking app for cloud users.