Time In A Bottle (or rather, in an app)

Any of my older readers remember this classic? This line seems to be my life lately:

"There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do"

This season of my life is so full. Blessedly, beautifully full. And I seem to always have to manage my time so precisely to get everything done.

Because of this I am always looking for ways to be more productive. One of the things that I have been slacking a bit on is record keeping for my transcription work. 2017 wasn't my best effort in that department. I like to keep track of the time I spend doing transcription work as well as how much it's actually paying me per hour. And I needed a new, streamlined way to do this so it' wouldn't take extra time or effort to keep track of this information

Now, in truth, I am a lover of all things that organize your life so up until this most recent season of multifaceted jobs, responsibilities and tasks I did a relatively decent job of just jotting down an estimate of how much time I spent per job. But the last year or so I find myself saying "I need to work on typing"( and not actually doing any typing) so much that I am wondering if I have a skewed idea of how much time I'm actually spending. And then when I actually sit down to track my work and income it's a bit of a mess!

Thus the hunt began for a tool that I could utilize to help  me track this information. I tried out a couple of time tracking devices. I found a few online websites that would have worked fine but were more involved than I needed. If you're having to track billable hours it looks like My Hours would be a great fit. It has several features that make it a great alternative for tracking hours, project and tasks and can be used with multiple users. But it wasn't exactly what I was looking for.
I need something that's:

• Easy to use
• Right on my desktop as I don't always have internet available when I'm working
• Free and 
• One button start and stop 

Which I found in Toggl . It has all the features I'm looking for to help me track, not only my transcription work but also time spent on other tasks and projects, like blogging. (For instance this post has taken me 15 minutes to write so far). The best thing about Toggl is that it's so user friendly. It opens in a small window that can be moved around on your desktop. The toolbar across the top is streamlined. Immediately below the toolbar is an input box that asks upon opening "What are you doing?" You just type the title of the task in this input box and click the green start button. When you are ready to take a break or quit working for the day you click the stop button ( the start and stop button are one and the same, it's use changes as you are recording or not recording time). If you come back to a task later you can simply click the "play" arrow button beside the title of that task.  Here's a screen shot of it on my laptop:

Simple and exactly what I was looking for. It's been a great addition to my tool belt of resources that I have been gathering to manage my productivity. Check it out and let me know if Toggl has been useful for you.

*Goals update: One of my career goals for 2018 is to do a better job with record keeping. I'm filing this one away as a great step towards that goal.