Comment by pitched
2 years ago
I use my calendar for this. The event name is my notes for what I did. I find I forget to hit start (or stop) at the exact perfect time with these tools so they’re always only showing a partial view. With the calendar, I can go through and add in events for what I did in the morning or the day before.
Also, the best tool I’ve found for accountability is to try and predict what you will spend time on before hand. So I have one calendar for my plan that I make first thing in the morning and another for what actually happened.
I do something similar. Hard to beat Apple Calendar’s UI, plus it’s syncable and shareable by default. I use the event title for the project I’m working on and the notes field for details. Have toyed with the idea of making an exporter to a spreadsheet format, but haven’t needed it badly enough yet. I like your idea of a separate planning calendar.
I've built https://billabl.co with this idea in mind. It's early days and I'm just hacking on it as a side project. I use the event title for the project name, or sometimes the client name (depending on how busy I am with that client, or how detailed my invoices need to be). Sometimes I'll create a separate calendar just for one client. So far it connects to Google calendars only.
I completely agree, the start stop thing never worked for me. I also didn't like the idea of those apps that track what applications you have open, seemed really creepy.
I built a tool to extract the calendar data (mentioned in abother comment, don't want to spam). I'd really appriciate any feedback you have :)