I’ve shared this little productivity tip with enough folks who have found it useful and figured I’d make a post out of it.
I love time tracking and I love task lists, but boy do I hate managing them both. So, I’ve been using my time tracker as my task list.
I use Harvest for time tracking. It allows you to create time entries in the future and I suspect many other time tracking apps do the same. That means today I can enter all the time entries I plan on doing tomorrow. Or, if I’m feeling super organized, I can create entries for the following week. All of my tasks are right there in front of me and ready to clock my time.
If I don’t get to a task that day? No worries. Harvest has a subtle feature that allows me to move a time entry from one day to another. Now, I’m good to go for the next day.
Again, other apps are probably capable of doing the same.
I know, it’s a super small thing but it delights me every day and helps me manage two important things in one.
When I was freelancing I applied the concept of merging time tracking with task tracking in another way. I would use my calendar app for Mac and I would use shortcodes like b2h (for billable 2 hours). I would then parse the calendar data to CSV (with a script that I had written for me – it’s on npm) to get neat billable hours per client when it was invoicing time.
Did not try to use toggl?
I’ve looked into it but ultimately love working in Harvest.
Handy little tip Geoff. I use Harvest every day, never thought about doing this. I will try it tomorrow. Cheers!
We use Trello at my office, and I recently discovered there’s a Toggl add-on through Chrome. Woot!
We are always tracking time at my office. Helps a lot with estimating capacity. We are using actiTIME for that. https://www.actitime.com/