Does anyone else run into issues tracking their time while working on tasks? For me, it always seems to take too much time just to track my time! It took me many moons of searching online for software that would take the pain out of it. Disheartened with the state of tools available for Mac OS X, I finally opted to roll my own solution.

All I wanted was the simplest of time tracking tools. It needed to track the time (obviously), the task and the project or client the task was for. Oh, and it had to have a very low overhead for data entry. That’s not so much to ask is it?

Time and time again I kept running into time tracking tools that required you to enter the client contact, their phone numbers, e-mail address, street address, billing rate, birthday, children’s names, first cousin’s addresses, first grade teacher’s name… Alright, slight exaggeration perhaps. But I shouldn’t be enslaved by my timesheet software for 20 minutes just so I can click the “start timer” button on one task!

Enter OmniOutliner

I didn’t have a lot of time (imagine that) to get a solution together, so I decided to use OmniGroup’s OmniOutliner to get the job done. A quick design for a template with some AppleScript wizardry and I had myself a workable result. So that’s it, the entire solution consists of a template file for OmniOutliner and an AppleScript to handle the time-stamping. Not too shabby I must say.

All you have to do is click the Start:Stop ActionScript button to enter the start time, or stop time. Then it calculates the time between the timestamps and fills in the total. To start a new entry it’s as easy as creating a new row and clicking the Start:Stop button, or with nothing selected clicking the Start:Stop button will create a new row for you and enter the starting timestamp.

I submitted this package to OmniGroup and it looks as if they’ve included it in their Useful Scripts download under the OmniOutliner extras. If you’d rather not download the entire Useful Scripts package, you can also download my timesheet solution here.

• Timesheet (ZIP, 28KB)

If you end up getting some use out of it, be sure to let me know.

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