Some freelance designers charge by the hour and we need a way to keep track of that time. There are numerous ways to do it; pen and paper, a watch, a stopwatch, software programs… there are as many ways to track time as there are designers. Thanks to One Digital Life, I may have found my way. It’s a widget for OS X (sorry PC Users) called The Daily Grind.
From the site:
TheDailyGrind is a Dashboard widget that offers a lightweight approach in keeping track of time spent on tasks you perform. TheDailyGrind is designed to take up as little of your time as possible managing your time to better let you focus on getting your jobs done.
The nice thing about it is it can keep track of multiple projects at once with the ability to label each task independently and to apply a label color to it.
My name’s Jen; I’m a cynical, sarcastic, ex-drummer who is fond of dark humor. I've held way too many factory & retail jobs but finally found my calling one Christmas holiday in a dark, musty basement. I am now a CSS & XHTML web standards looney and can be found daily—when I’m not at my Mac—at the local fair-trade coffee shop buying an iced-soy mocha no matter the temperature.
I am also the owner of Pop Stalin Design specializing in CSS & XHTML web design as well as custom WordPress themes.
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I have developed a similar timer for Windows, although not exactly the same. You can check out a trial version at http://www.milenine.com/simple_task_timer/
Re: forgetting to start and stop the timer… it is a common problem. I tried a timer that stared automatically when a new window was open, but that actually became a real mess. The only thing that has worked for me was to modify my behavior. Whenever I start a work task, I start a timer. Now, I’ve just gotten so much into the habit that sometimes when I’m doing personal work I stop and think “Did I start a timer?”. To make it easy to launch my timer, I have placed a shortcut to my timer app in my Quick Launch bar.
Bob
Ahh, this has been great. I started using it over the weekend. Thanks for the tip!
OR you could find someone that has good coding skills to make this and release it as open source
hint hint guys
Well you know what that means don’t you? You gotta buy a mac!