James Thigpen

So today was my first day working as a purely independent contractor. I had been working full time, then transitioned to full time contracting with the same company, and today I blossomed into being solely a consultant and owner of my awesome sexy company, Unit of Work, LLC.

And what a day it’s been! I’ve managed to… do a lot of administrative tasks. Wait. What? What’s that you say? You can’t bill for administrative tasks? Yes. Well, I know that.

But since taking on my own clients, a lot of administrative tasks had piled up working full time. My time keeping system consisted of post it notes, and while I had QuickBooks, I hadn’t actually bothered to learn how to create an invoice.

Time keeping software is scary. It’s pretty much a horrible task, so any software you use only makes a horrible task computerized and more horrible. There’s no real winning with time keeping. Nobody has ever said, “Oh man, last night, I got home and I got to record my time! It was so awesome!”

I consulted my OCD friend Lifehacker for reviews of various Time Tracking Softwares. timeEdition seemed relatively popular, so I downloaded it and started transferring all my post it notes of billable hours into it. It seems to be pretty simple which is what I wanted. Select customer, project, and task, click start, work, click stop, and bam, you’re done.

That’s nice, but entering historical hours is pretty painful. A date picker which always defaults to today, and some pretty picky time selection controls makes for rough waters. I persevered, and I think, moving forward, it will work nicely.

Likes: Simple, Easy to Use
Dislikes: Painful Manual Data Entry UX, Doesn’t Store Database in the Cloud

I could rant about QuickBooks sucking, but everyone who uses it already knows that, so I’ll leave it at that. I have nothing new to contribute.

I’m so excited though. I did Administrivia, and I loved it. I’m ready to take over the world! At least as soon as I get this invoice to save to PDF.