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Comment by rrggnnlldd | Hacker News Reader

Wow that sounds great. Were you be able to charge overtime?

And since you said "worked", what made you decide to stop popping back to the issues queue at this particular org?

I never hit 40 hours a week. Thirty seemed like a good balance between work/life. Eventually, working on a CRUD app didn't peak my interest anymore and I moved onto some other projects. Company was sold a few years later.

How did you track your time? I kind of love this idea but time tracking is a pain in the ass. Seems like maybe you could use "day" or "half day" granularity?

You need to get used to it.

Use a kitchen timer, then every time you finish something input the time precisely.

There's an app and site called Toggl that makes this easier.

It actually complicates things in my experience. Nothing beats a physical item with a stop/start button

I used RescueTime when I was freelancing. It's an app you install and it tracks what you're working on down to the second. It works by reading the titlebar of your current app, so it works well for development, and you can set up filters in the web dashboard to divide by projects and so on. Of course there's a privacy trade-off to consider as it's a SaaS.

TimingApp is a similar alternative with a local-only option. If I recall correctly, the syncing feature is opt-in and only required if you’d like to sync activity from multiple computers.

I typically use 15 or 30 minute granularity, and I remember to log stuff multiple times per day (not every few minutes, but at least a couple) Time trackers that watch what you're doing are handy, sometimes, until you take a call away from the computer. You just had a 30 minute meeting about something - you're not at a computer. Did it not happen because it wasn't logged by an app tracking your screen/windows? Of course it did - you just have to get used to doing it. Tracking down to a minute is generally pointless for some (most?) situations - people generally care about the results/outcome, and allocating time to various buckets shouldn't be overly important.

I HAVE been in situations where logging 19 minutes to project X and 37 minutes to project Y was 'crucial' because 'accuracy was vital' but... damnit - I don't stop thinking about your project just because I'm not sitting in front of some time tracking app. I avoid those situations wherever possible now (and it's quite possible).

> tracking is a pain in the ass

It becomes a lot easier when you need to do it to get paid.

I loathe time tracking for internal metrics, but if I need to do it to get paid the motivations change and it just becomes part of the workflow.

I use org-mode. I have a .org file for each company, then TODO bullets for whatever task, usually copied directly from Jira or etc. Org-clock-in when I start my day, org-clock-out when I finish, estimate an extra hourish for whatever slack messages I answer throughout the day.

I used to be super granular about it until I realized I was billing the equivalent of 8 hours of work as a full time engineer, as 2.5 hrs or whatever, due to the nature of granular billing. Turns out I'm hella unproductive when I spend all day at the office. So I switched to more like dedicating some chunk of my day to work, then billing that chunk, even if some of the time I was making coffee or like, going on a quick walk break.

In all honesty with how much more productive I am as a contractor I could probably justify billing flat 8 hours a day but I'm just too honest or something.

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