Time tracking utilities
With my new job, I now work from home and I'm responsible for tracking all of my time myself. Before, it was easy. I was at work from 9am - 5:30pm with a half hour lunch, I got paid for the time that I was there. Now, it is not so clear cut, so I have to track different start and stop times as I sometimes do non-work related stuff.
I've been trying to find some utilities to help me do this and keep a history of my time. Currently, I've just been jotting things onto my whiteboard, but my whiteboard isn't all that big and it has other stuff on it as well (notes, code ideas, object layouts, etc... it is cluttered).
I did some looking around yesterday and came up with a few that I have been trying. First, Time Sled is the closest to what I want. Its UI isn't exactly what I envisioned, but it seems to do most everything I want and seems to have a pretty nice reporting tool. Also, what I really wanted, was a little icon in the system tray to start and stop the timer as I come and go. The one thing I wish it had was some sort of expense tracking. It can have an hourly rate for your time and price out what your time was worth, but nothing to track expenses.
Second, I'd looked at Time Panic, but have kind of already crossed it out. It doesn't quite have the layout and reporting that I'd wanted. Also, no system tray icon.
Third, I got Visual TimeAnalyzer, which is a spiffy little program, but doesn't seem to have a timer functionality. It seems to tracking how long various programs are running on the computer and specify the time as being spent on various projects. The problem is, I could go to lunch and leave Visual Studio open, and it could keep counting time, but that isn't billable. Or right now, I have VPC running with work stuff open, but I'm not working right now. This is more of a monitoring tool.
Finally, there was Time Meter, which I though I was going to love. It integrates with Outlook, which I figured would be nice, since then I could have it like Newsgator and store everything within Exchange and I could access some of my data from on the go. However, it doesn't let you store it in Exchange, it creates its own PST file. Its way for storing items has more of a "work-around" feel to it rather than an actual solution. Its "Projects" are custom Tasks with user defined fields. Then its time entries and expenses are just customized Journal items. Also, it has no system tray icon. And one annoyance, every time I go into one of its sections, the folder listing changes and I have to hit Mail see all of folders and then go to another section.
Anybody else have any suggestions that I might like before committing to buying one (since they're all basically 30-day shareware)?