Tidalsand

Of course, the very worst time to fill in a weekly timesheet is late on a Friday afternoon. It’s the last thing you want to be doing and your memory’s going to be pretty hazy – it’s hard enough to remember what you’ve done at the end of the same day.

What we’d all like is for our time to be tracked for us during the week so we’re presented with something pretty close to what we’d like to submit just before we submit it. You need something lurking in the background that knows what you’re doing as you’re doing it. Lots of options here: if everything you do is based around a computer there are widgets that record the window title of the application you’re working on; there are widgets that let you select what you’re doing at the moment from a list; you might want to link through to some other application that’s already tracking what you’re doing; if you do the same stuff every week (poor you), you might just want to copy last weeks timesheet.

There’s always going to be a need to tweak things on Friday afternoon, but any time-tracking application worth it’s salt would let you get pretty much there before you even started.

That’s the “painless” side of things we’re aiming for.