Tracking Time

          Helping writers write more. That’s our vision.

          In order to organize your time well, you must know where you are spending it. Every one of us has other responsibilities, many that have to be done before the writing. Or at least not neglected because of the writing. It might be a Day Job or children, elderly parents or a husband or anything else. We have to realistically evaluate what kind of time we really have to devote to writing.

          The first step to discovering that is to track every moment of your day for several days or weeks. Once you have that information, you can begin to analyze where you can cut and what has to stay. I don’t know about you, but that is the hardest thing for me to do. I get busy doing something and forget to write anything down for hours (or days).

          Several months ago I learned of a time clock program. It is marketed to employers to track employees’ time. There was a free download trial version that would track 3 employees. I decided to try it out, making my fiction writing and blog writing my 3 employees (I have 2 blogs I contribute to regularly). It worked really well. I was able to track my time and pull up reports of time spent. Because it is made to track employee time, thought, it has a lot of features I don’t need, like wage or payroll tax info. (Although, by giving my time an hourly rate, I could see at a glance just what my time is worth).

          I liked it enough, though, to wanted to be able to use it to track all my time, all my projects. But the price was way more than I wanted to pay. I asked my computer software developer husband (who was between contracts) what it would take to write a similar program, without all the employee ‘bells ad whistles’. He was intrigued and, as I said between contracts, so he wrote Time Tracker. (We have to change the name. There are already several programs by that name.). I’ve been using it, and giving him suggestions for improvements, for a couple of months. We almost have it to a place where I can send it to Kitty and Shonna for their input.

          Once we have it polished and perfected, we hope to offer it to our blog readers. Would you be interested? Do you see a use for a program that will help you track your time? What features would you like it to have? What would you name it? And most importantly, do you think it would help you write more?