If there is some all-knowing, all-seeing deity out there entering my every step into the Book of Life, I wish said deity would give me access to its pages now and then to assist with my time entry duties. The money I spent, time I labored, and pain I endured in testing, configuring, and managing time-tracking systems should have earned me such a boon.
Tracking time is a necessary evil for Legal Project Managers, especially if they are practicing attorneys. Even if you do not bill by the hour, it is still important to track your time to understand how long tasks take to improve your estimates, gain insight into how you are actually spending your time, and find bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your work processes. Tracking time, however, is generally laborious and unpleasant. Those who don't have to track their time in order to get paid generally don't track their time at all, despite the value such data provides. Therefore, any technology that can help automate the process and encourage the practice is welcome.
One of the most common time-tracking programs used by lawyers is Time Slips, by Sage Software. Many practice management and billing software packages offer their own time-keeping features. There are also, increasingly, a number of excellent SaaS solutions that will allow you to track time from almost anywhere--your desktop, Web browser, your e-mail, by SMS, and smart-phone applications. My current favorite is Toggl.
The problem with nearly all time-tracking solutions, however, is that they still require users to possess the discipline to manually enter their time. Modern time-tracking solutions like Toggl make the manual process easier by providing timers, auto-fill form fields, and multiple input methods so you can track time from almost anywhere, but you still have to enter the data and remember to stop/pause and create new records when you switch tasks. Since much of the work we do and need to track as legal-project managers is computer based, it would be great to have our computer activity tracked automatically.
Thankfully, such software exists. For years I used Task Capture, by CaptureWorks, Inc. It tracks active time for many common programs and will prompt you to fill out records for your various activities. It is even smart enough to remember which documents are associated with which client and project, so you you don't have to continually re-enter that data. The enterprise version of the software, Job Capture, allows you to set up centralized client and project lists and create job templates.
As I started using more Web-based apps, however, I found that TaskCapture's automatic logging was useless for much of the work I was doing. A similar product I've been testing recently is Chrometa. Chrometa does a much better job at tracking time spent on Web pages, but I wish it were possible to tweak it so that it would aggregate all time spent on a given site. With on-line e-mail, it makes sense to track each page separately so you can log each e-mail read and written. If, however, you have a SharePoint site dedicated to a given matter, it would be helpful to have Chrometa aggregate all activity on that site, rather than log activity for each page under that site.
A bigger problem with Task Capture and Chrometa is that you have to be on your computer with the software installed to enter tasks, which isn't helpful if you work from multiple machines or work away from the computer a lot. While I still find tools like Task Capture and Chrometa helpful for conducting the occasional self-audit of my computer use, I do not use them for actually tracking billable time. For that I use Toggl.
[UPDATE 2010-07-30: Chrometa e-mailed me and informed me of their current beta version. Based on customer feedback Chrometa has decided to move in the direction of the cloud and has "redesigned the Chrometa experience from the ground up." I've signed up to be a beta tester and will share my thoughts after I've tried it out for a while.]
Even though it requires starting and stopping the timers manually, which does increase the risk that I might forget to enter something or forget to stop the timer, at least I have access to it from multiple devices without having to worry about manually synchronizing anything, exporting CSV files, or otherwise copying time data.What I don't understand is why Toggl doesn't make a desktop client that will automatically track your activities from which you can create time entries.
[CLARIFICATION 2010-07-30: Toggl's desktop widget, does have an "Autopilot" option, which "will study your behaviour by memorizing the projects you are tracking and the applications that are in focus while tracking. After a short study period, it can give you suggestions on what project to track, based on the application currently in focus." I use this now and it is alternatively handy or annoying as it prompts me with "I'm not sure what project you are working on" messages as I switch applications. Also, it does not keep a log of all my computing activity, so it doesn't help with self-audits or looking for work you forgot to create a time entry for.]
This is what I would like to see in a time-tracking product:
- tie a Chrometa-like, desktop-activity tracker to a Toggl-like, cloud-based timer;
- track my activity on my Smartphone in the same way I can automatically track time on my desktop computer;
- make good use of the geolocation features of modern smart phones:
- the phone should know when I'm moving to a new location and prompt me to stop an active timer;
- I should be able to tell it what areas are associated with work or a client;
- it should have an option to prompt me to start a new timer when I move to a work-related or client location; and
- it should have the option to automatically, in the background, log my time spent at various locations.
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