Tracking time without wasting time doing it ;)

The life of every Freelancer, Costumer service, Developer, Tester or generally speaking every person around the world that works on a fast passed company or as a freelancer needs to keep track of their time.

Not logging time means you might not get payed. Therefore, lets log time to keep your managers/clients happy.

There're several free apps on the web that will help you track your time efficiently and easy (with only couple of clicks).

A nice app that i like to use is the KanbanFlow which gives you a kanban board online, accessible from everywhere, and lets you create your own tasks easily and start tracking time on each one of them. It also has some other neat features that i would leave you to figure out, but one that is also awesome is the Timer that it has on the bottom left corner, which lets you follow the pomodoro 'sprints' of 25 minutes and alerts you whenever it reaches the time to take a a break. A 5 minute break every hour will keep your brain 'fresh' to tackle new problems. 

The con on that app is that its a web app only, and personally is not really a downside, because i'm always on my latop with the browser open, some other people might prefer a mobile app.

For those that prefer mobile apps, there's also a very nice one called Toggle, and this one has both web and mobile app synchronized, this way one can track time on any platform, because it will be synched across. One great thing about this one is the fact that as soon you click on the start new task it starts logging time, even without any name, and you update it as you go. For example, lets think of a Professional Service person, that receives a call from an unexpected client to configure a system or solve some problem; the PS only needs to go to his mobile device and start a new task, the time will start counting, and at the end of the call update the task log with the client name, project name, whatever is required. This will lead to track almost every minute to the correct client/task/project, and will give you real statistics at the end of the day/week/sprint.

Advantages of using this 3rd party tools/apps to track time instead of using your company one? These are easier to learn and use, and track your time for real. Normaly the software used by the companies are inhouse software, or software integrated with their own CRM software, which normaly makes it difficult to integrate and therefore, use. By using these 3rd party tools (kind of a broker) makes you to discipline yourself on using a tool, follow your own process daily, and at the end of the day/week (depending on your company rules) just update your official records.

The important thing is to record time correctly, i don't think managers will go against you if you track your time acurate, even if its with 3rd party tools, and then update the official records. One important thing to bear in mind, because your using 3rd party tools, that synchs data with other servers,  you might be caraful with the data you write on the tasks . As a personal recommendation, don't put any confidential info there.