Once upon a time, I wrote a time tracking application for an employer which remained in use for nearly 10 years after I wrote it, counting up hundreds of thousands of billable man-hours of time for our OEM customers.  I loved writing it but I absolutely hated using it.  Like many engineers, I preferred getting work done to the tedious bureaucratic task of entering my time into a sheet, no matter how easy I made it to use.

Now, as a business owner, I recently started having some difficulty sticking to the schedules I set for myself and realized that a big part of the reason was due to a lack of time tracking.  I decided to bite the bullet and give it a shot.

The first thing you need to do is find a tool:  Sure you could use Excel, but it's certainly not ideal.  I did a quick search and found a great free application called ActiTime.  Their software runs locally or on a web server, powered with MS Access or MySQL under the hood.  It's fast, simple, and takes about 5 minutes to set up and start using.  It has simple reporting and exports CSVs into Excel for any kind of charting or analysis you can dream up.

The first week was a bit of a mess.  When you get excited about it you start imagining how wonderful it would be to have a detailed log of every minute spent, properly categorized into various customers, projects and categories, and end up with too much information.  Having had some practice, I decided to start over and began with a much simpler list of broad task categories.  This is the final list I came up with:

• Billable Work
• Branding
• Business Development
• Business Improvements
• Customer Support
• Marketing
• Money Management
• Networking
• Prospecting (In-Person)
• Prospecting (Online)
• Prospecting (Phone)
• Self-Improvement

Since this is a time tracking system for business, I decided to leave off anything personal that did not have any tangible benefit to the business.  This list is working out pretty well.

Here's an actual data-entry screen from ActiTime, it's pretty easy to use: 

Do you track time?  What have you learned?  Do you have any broad categories that I neglected to mention?  What software are you using?

Tweet @HaveAByte to share your experience.  Now if you'll excuse me, I need to track 15 minutes of my blogging time into Marketing, since I am spreading this around the TwitterVerse!