Which is another way of saying: web-based time tracking companies, please stop trying to pimp yourselves through my comments. If an actual user has a recommendation (as Chris did above), that’s fine with me. But I am uninterested in serving as your advertising space.

How about having a look at TSheets.com? With a Google gadget, Mac desktop widget, Jott.com integration, clock in/out via SMS, and an iPhone 3G specific app, there’s a bit of something for everyone at TSheets.

Yeah, what I need is really just a way to ping myself relative to the time that I’m already tracking. A log file would be of limited usefulness for me because I’m less interested in what I’m doing at any given point of the day than in how much time some billable task took. Given the lack of readily available tools, though, I may just need to resort to a roll-your-own type thing.

Harvest is pretty slick; I hadn’t seen that time tracker before.

Glad to hear others are looking for a similar solution that I am. I have come up with a desktop solution for tracking my doings throughout the day, but that seems a bit of a different focus than what you are looking for (time tracking).

One other option I would mention—Harvest. Although it’s web app, it has a nice widget for OS X. And although it’s intended for billing clients, I’ve found it useful simply for tracking time on tasks.

We will be implementing another feature that may help you. You will be able to select multiple sessions and smartly combine them into one session. Which means you could start and stop your timer all-day, enter a comment for just one of the sessions or for several of the sessions, and have them all smartly combined into one single session with the comments time stamped.

Thanks for the great feedback. It’s people like you that help shape OfficeTime.

After taking a quick look, too, Intervals looks a little too involved for my needs. Things is serving my task management needs, and like I said I’m generally skeptical of web-based apps when the task is something so central to my workday.

Thanks for the suggestion, though! I’m always interested to see new solutions and Intervals is certainly one of the snazziest trackers online that I’ve seen so far.

- In whatever program I’m in, I hit a hotkey and OfficeTime tosses a simple textbox up (sort of like the quick entry panel for software like Things, OmniFocus, etc. but likely with just a text field).
- I enter a short comment about what I just finished or started.
- The comment is added to the Comments field of the running task with a timestamp without OfficeTime ever being called into focus (preferably a timestamp relative to the timer, not to the actual time). This way I can look back and say “Ok, at 1:32 into the task, I finished such-and-such” but at the time my workflow is as smooth and uninterrupted as possible.

You could probably manage it differently; the two things that tickle my fancy are easy and fast to access from anywhere, and having the comment associated with a specific time relative to the timer. Specific design is less of an issue.

I’ve tried stopping and starting, but my problem is that then I have to fill comments out when I stop and start (which can throw off my flow and half the time I forget, anyway). Additionally, my employer has me enter my time into their online tracking software rather than using OfficeTime’s reporting/invoicing features, so both my life and theirs is easier if I can just enter one chunk per client per day.

Thanks for visiting!

I’m the lead Visioneer for OfficeTime, and yes, we do listen to the community and add smart features that can be put in intuitively and elegantly without creating bloat.

If I understand you correctly, would a hotkey to type a timestamp do the trick? Or do you really need something more.

I know where you’re coming from and personally I solve it by stopping and starting timers more often than I pause timers which leaves a good list of what I’ve been up to during the day.

– Stephen
http://www.officetime.net