Does anyone know of PIMs/outliners providing timekeeping/reporting features, i.e. reporting on how much time one spent on a certain project?

I've seen this functionality in Personal Brain; it's part of the metadata it maintains and one can actually sort items by the time one spent focused on them.

An alternative would be some kind of flexible timesheet software but it should be really easy to integrate so that it doesn't become a separate timecost center by itself.

Stephen, as a lawyer, any suggestions? I've seen that most timesheet software (at least the ones I've seen) targets the legal profession.

alx

Does anyone know of PIMs/outliners providing timekeeping/reporting features, i.e. reporting on how much time one spent on a certain project?

Alexander,

Have you ever looked at The Journal (www.davidrm.com)? It is a journaling, writing program with a zillion features, one of which is a stop watch, the time of which you can then insert into your journal. Not the most sophisticated approach, but perhaps practical, especially given the many other features of this program. Just for the record, some of these features are as follows:

1. Keep dated or "notebook" (non-dated) databases; that is, entries categorized by date or entries with your own categories, like most of our free-form databases.

2. A tabbed interface for switching among the databases.

3. A full-range of writing tools, including spell-checker, thesaurus, word counts and more.

4. Further categorize sections of text within any single entry by assigning topics to them. You can assign any number of topics within any entry, though specific text can only have one topic. Search by topic.

5. Full-featured word processor (though, no footnoting, something I miss), including a crude outliner.

If you haven't checked it out, it is worth a look.

Steve Z.

Have a look to TimeSled:
http://www.enins.com/timesled/

Steve, about the diary category, I've found Advanced Diary, a great freeware:
http://www.csoftlab.com/Diary.html

Sebastien

Alexander, UltraRecall has a time/date stamp (alt z). You could keep a log of project time in UR, using alt z when you start, alt z when you finish. The onlyl thing is you would have to calculate the amount of time yourself, but at least it would be a record.

Daly

Alex

InfoRecall has a "time tracker" module. Haven't tried it though.

http://www.phantech.com/html/timetracker.html

Jack

I bill all my consultancy work by the hour and have used several tools for this.

Above&Beyond/TimeTo has a simple but effective method.

When you start work on an item, pressing F5 starts a timer, hitting the space bar marks the item done and stops the timer. There are also tools to pause the timer. Completed items are added using F10

You can then create reports by project and time period, that are opened in Notepad allowing the information to be copied and pasted into Excel.

Now and again I decide that this isn't good enough and I have used more dedcicated tools such as the now defunct Time Reporter and still going Responsive Time Logger http://www.responsivesoftware.com/ this syncs with the Palm and is reasonably sophisticated allowing you to produce customised invoices, keep track of what work has been billed etc. This

And to reflect on your legal theme, I have also used Time Matters version 3 through to 6. This is without doubt the best PIM I have ever used and is an all in one time tracking tool, diary, document management tool etc etc. Again this would keep track of time and produce reports/invoices ettc It is a great program spoiled for me by bugs and poor technical support. http://www.timematters.com/

In the end I keep on coming back to A&B/TimeTo, primarily because as I said before it is still the most effective task management tool I have used and although the time tracking lacks the sophistication of the other tools I have used, it is also the easiest to keep track of and modify.

If you do get tempted by Outlook there are a few tools that run inside Outlook and use your Todo and appointment details to create time sheets. The only one I have tried is Bill Power http://www.billpower.com/billpow.htm

This seemed OK, but I never tried it in earnest.

Graham

Does anyone know of PIMs/outliners providing timekeeping/reporting features, i.e. reporting on how much time one spent on a certain project?

I've seen this functionality in Personal Brain; it's part of the metadata it maintains and one can actually sort items by the time one spent focused on them.

An alternative would be some kind of flexible timesheet software but it should be really easy to integrate so that it doesn't become a separate timecost center by itself.

Stephen, as a lawyer, any suggestions? I've seen that most timesheet software (at least the ones I've seen) targets the legal profession.<

Sorry I didn't get to this more timely. I haven't used the time-tracking software for lawyers. It's one of the few things I prefer to do manually. I noticed though that the pim InfoRecall XP (both the 2004 and 2005 versions) has integrated timing.

[IR is a program I haven't used much, because of the reports that its very buggy. (In my very casual testing of the 2005 version, I haven't actually found bugs myself. I'm wondering if more bugs are apparent with other versions of Windows, as it's ostensibly optimised for XP, and perhaps not tested much on earlier Windows.)]

Stephen Diamond

The journal function in Zoot could be used for this -- and if I am correct, having had my first real Zoot experience yesterday -- you ought to be able to create views that reflect the different clients for who you are tracking time. I do not know if Zoot would do the addition for you or not.

Daly