What I’m doing: I am a freelancer in a creative field. I don’t like tracking my time to the minute because it just doesn’t work for me, so I generally just make note of ‘Project A - 0.5 days, Project B - 0.5 days’ at the end of the day, then when it comes to the time to invoice the clients I just cobble it all together. It’s a mess.
What I hope to do: Is there a good way anyone has figured out to keep track of the days I have worked and need to invoice on within Agenda? I’m very eager to keep everything within one app if possible, so if there’s a way I can make time entries correspond to calendar time blocks, for example, or whatever else might work inside Agenda… I don’t know - I’m rambling. Hopefully someone out there knows where I’m coming from.
Main point - very keen to not use a time tracking app, even though eventually my time will need to go into an invoice in Xero and they have integrations etc. I just don’t work well with too many apps to attend to.
I don’t really have much experience with this myself. We don’t have any time tracking built into Agenda.
I guess if you were disciplined, you could make a note for each block of work, and assign it to a calendar event of the right length.
If it were me, I would probably just make a single “Time Tracking” note, put it On-the-Agenda so I can find it very fast, and enter a line for what I did each day. Probably make it a checklist, so I can checkoff when I have invoiced the entries. Something like that.
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I work on multiple client projects throughout the day. I keep a single “Plan for (date)” note for each day with the tasks I work on for each project. Then I have a line item for each client / billable line with how long I worked on it (“Client A Development - 2 hours” / “Client A Support - 1 hour” / “Client B - 4 hours” etc).
Sounds like it may be similar to the cobbled together mess you describe, I’m not sure. It is nice and clean for me since all of the day’s information is in a single note, and I record my time in Harvest broken up by day and line item. I reference the tasks in the day’s note when setting the notes field in Harvest. It takes < 2 minutes to enter time at the end of the day, and < 5 minutes if I’m entering everything for the previous week.
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I wonder if you looked in Screen Time if that would give you an idea? I mean, it would be entire app usage, but might be an indicator.
If you’re billing time, though, time tracking applications are probably in your future (I hear good things about Timery). The good news is that one could use Shortcuts (once Monterey) to start and stop timers while opening a particular Agenda project, which could help ease the pain of managing multiple apps.
Just some ideas!
ScottyJ
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Thanks! Good food for thought.
I know you said you didn’t want to use a time tracking app but I use Timing App Timing Automatic Mac Time Tracker – Manual Timers Optional for exactly this purpose. It’s a lot different from the traditional start a clock, stop a clock (although it can do that) as it tracks which apps are in focus and what documents are open. I tend to suffix all client documents with a three letter code for that client to make it easier to find but it can also track by path so if you have all your client files in the same directory it can sum them up.
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