I finally bought a proper time tracking app and it saved my week

I mean, I've been just guessing my hours for years, writing them on a napkin or trying to remember later. Last month was a mess with three clients at once, and I was sure I was undercharging one of them. So I bit the bullet and spent $12 a month on Toggl. It felt silly to pay for a timer, but wow. This week I ran the report and saw I'd actually put 22 hours into a project I quoted for 15. I was able to go back to the client with the real numbers and adjust the final invoice, which covered the app cost for like a year. It also showed me how much time I was wasting on small admin tasks I thought were quick. Has anyone else found a simple tool that fixed a big blind spot like that?

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ivan_perez7mo ago

Honestly, that whole guessing hours thing hits home. I used to do the same with mileage for my old job, just rough estimates on a gas station receipt. Then I got a basic GPS logger app that just ran in the background, and the first month it showed I'd driven almost 400 miles more than I wrote down. That was a real wake up call about how bad I am at guessing anything with numbers. It feels so dumb to need an app for something that seems simple.

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miles_sanchez7mo ago

Yeah our brains are just terrible at tracking that stuff without help. I had a similar thing with my phone's screen time report showing I spent way more time on apps than I thought. It's wild how wrong our gut feeling can be about simple numbers.

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thea_mitchell206mo ago

Honestly all that tracking sounds like a headache. I just round up my hours and it works fine. Like @ivan_perez with his mileage, maybe being a little off is just the cost of doing business without extra apps.

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