So my quest to find the perfect solution to keep track of time spent on tasks has not come to an end yet. I have been searching for a while and still haven’t found something that I am 100% happy with.
Today, I found and tried another one. A couple of days ago I found a software application for the Mac that does affordable and decent invoice creation with some minimal report creation and whatnot. I am giving it a fair trial. It is free, but alas this doesn’t mean that it is the one. The price is right, though. I’m keeping track of them in a spread sheet as well so I’ll have all the viable information in both places lest I decide to not use ExpressInvoice.
I knew that there were other packages that this company had done, so I went to see if there were any for Mac that included time tracking. There was – Hour Guard. It too was free. I downloaded it and gave it a trial run.
I can’t say that it was awful. It wasn’t. It wasn’t bad at all. It just didn’t do anything more than what I already had from using iClockr. The one disadvantage over the one I was currently using was that it did not allow for overlapping tasks. I invoice by the task, but often I’ll be working on another task for another client while I have videos processing in the background…the ability to track multiple tasks at the same time is something that is beneficial to me. Heaven forbid I have something in the microwave, the sprinklers running on the microwave’s timer (not cooking timer), something in the oven, and working on something on the computer all at the same time…
Even with iClockr, I can’t have more than 1 timer running at a time. I can, however, go back and edit the entries so that I can add and alter the times. It doesn’t care if your tasks overlap or not. Time worked is time worked to it. It is up to me to decipher between who it was for. With Hour Guard, however, while you also can’t run more than 1 timer and you could edit the times to add and whatnot…you couldn’t have 2 event times that overlapped.
I quickly uninstalled Hour Guard. It wasn’t a bad program. It would work just fine for someone who has to track tasks that are done one at a time. I do recommend it for the light, non-multi-tasking user. It just wasn’t the right one for me. So for now, I will keep my trusty dusty spiral notebook with my pen to jot down start and end times for the various things I have going…
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