TimeSlice time tracking software

It seems I have a constant stream of friends and acquaintances who are becoming independant contractors or starting to supplement their income with contracting work.

As a result I am always answering questions about staying organized and my general business practices.

One of the most common questions I get is about how I manage and track my time. I’ll get into time management in another post as it’s a much more complicated explanation.

I use a wonderful little application called TimeSlice to track my time. I’ve played around with a variety of other applications but none of them suited the way I work as well as TimeSlice.

It’s quite easy to set up multiple clients and projects, to set your billing increment (by the hour or by the minute), set your hourly rate per customer, and then total up your hours. (You can even prepare invoices from within the application – but I have to confess I haven’t tried this feature yet – I use InDesign )

Whether you’re billing by the project or by the hour you should get into the habit of tracking your time. You may even want to set up a project for your own company so that you can keep track of how much time you spend on administrative effort versus actual billable hours.

If you use a similar application on Mac OS X and you’re really happy with it let me know, I’m always interested in investigating software alternatives even when I’m happy with what I’ve got.