A freelancer’s day rarely goes the way you planned it over coffee.
Mine usually starts calmly: a quick look at the calendar, timer on, off I go. And then life happens. Sometimes a Teams call comes in and a client wants to talk about some new social media thing. Sometimes I’m sitting at the agency I’m working for and a colleague stops by my desk to quickly sort something out — about a completely different project, naturally. And sometimes it’s just an email: “Could you make one small change?” That small change then takes twenty minutes.
If you work for several clients at once, sit in a co-working space, or spend part of your week at an agency, you know how this goes: the day isn’t one block of work, it’s one block of work plus a dozen small things cutting across it. And they rarely arrive as calendar entries — they just arrive.
For a long time, that was exactly my problem with time tracking. Not the big chunks. These small interruptions.
Because honestly, I often didn’t track them at all. Someone talks to me, we sort it out, and afterwards: right, what was that again? Do I stop the running timer, create a new one, find the right project, and enter the rest by hand? It was only a moment — forget it. So it went unrecorded. And with it, time I was entitled to.
The awkward part is that these “it was only a moment” moments often aren’t, and they add up. By the end of the month it’s missing from the invoice. Not on the client’s side — I never wanted to send anyone an invoice I wasn’t sure about, so when in doubt I billed the lower number and covered the difference myself.
Why did it happen? Not for lack of discipline, but because recording it in the moment was too much work. Right when the colleague is standing at my desk or I’m reading the email, I’m supposed to stop the running timer, create a new one, dig out the right project, and then remember to start the first one again afterwards. Nobody does that on the side. So you don’t — and that’s where the time goes.
These days I do exactly one thing: colleague at the desk, Teams call, the quick email request — I press the small yellow bolt at the bottom of the timer.
My running timer switches to pause, and a second one starts, which I assign to the interruption — different client, different project, done. At the top there’s just a small line telling me which main activity is waiting. Once the conversation is over, I end the short timer and my actual one carries on as if nothing happened. The nice part: usually I already know the client who’s calling, so I assign the time while we’re still talking.
I’ll admit I wasn’t sold on this button at first. The frustration behind it came from me — but whether that really needed its own feature, I had my doubts. My co-founder was certain from day one that this would end up being the feature nobody wants to give up. I tried it and didn’t want to work without it after the first day. So much for my judgment.
So the nice thing isn’t that there’s one more button. The nice thing is that a whole category of “I’ll do it later, ah, forget it” simply disappears. In the evening the numbers add up, without me reconstructing from memory what exactly happened between eleven and twelve.
Nothing earth-shattering. But those small interruptions haven’t cost me any time since — and honestly, that feels better than I expected.