It’s amazing to me that this “thing” floating around in my head doesn’t exist:

1.  You pick a project.
2.  You press a button whenever you’re working on the project.
3.  You’re given the option of noting what you’re working on.
4.  You press the button when you’re done with that task.
5.  The time per project/task is automatically calculated, and the data is sortable.

It’s possible there’s a high-end (read: expensive) solution to offer such a service, but there’s also a reasonable alternative: any computer with Excel or access to Google Docs.

To follow along with this #hack, you should download the Excel file here.

Once you’ve downloaded and opened the spreadsheet, you should be looking at something like this:

The spreadsheet itself is extremely straight-forward.  Remember that start and stop button I imagined?  We can substitute that by pressing [Control] + [Shift] + ;

The above key combination will insert the time into the cell you have highlighted.  So if you’re doing one task (like researching case law) for one client, you insert the time into the cell where you begin, and you do it once more when you’re finished.

- BEGIN MATH ALERT –

The automation comes from the equation I’ve worked into the TOTAL sheet.  You should probably understand how it works in case you need to alter the table to suit your own purposes.  What we really want to do is figure out how much time elapsed between your inserting the time, right?  So assuming you do that in the correct cells, what we really want to do is subtract the beginning time from the ending time, and that should give the total.  So the excel equation in it’s simplest form should look like this:

=D2-C2

The only problem with that is that it won’t account for time done on the same project in the other begin/end columns.  To fix that, we need to add those up as well, so the equation becomes:

=((D2-C2)+(F2-E2)+(H2-G2)+(J2-I2))

- END MATH SECTION -

Don’t worry about having to input that equation more than once, either.  If you select the cell containing the equation as indicated by the circle in the diagram, then click on the square in the bottom right-hand corner and drag down, the equation will insert itself into the cells while editing itself to match the new rows (projects).

I’ll be interested to see if people are able to use this method to suit their needs, and I’d love to hear how you adapt the basic concept to make it more applicable to your work.  As always, if you have any questions or problems, just post in the comments and I’ll try to help out.

(Note: this process is exactly the same, including the equations, on Google Apps)