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Tracking time and expenses

In my previous job, I simply had to keep track of time spent on some project. I used SDS Time for years: simple, straightforward, and with the data in CSV format on my desktop, quite easy to fill out the company time sheets. We didn’t monitor anything beyond “hours on a project”, and with categories and so, I could also keep track of time spent on certain private projects and boards and so.

When I started working as freelance consultant, I wanted to track time, and expenses as well, in more detail: what kind of activities do I spent my time and money on? SDS Time no longer fitted my needs, so I started to look around. Surfing around, it’s obvious we’re moving into a category where there’s money attached 🙂

  • Standard Time offers a lot, including project management, integration with M$ Project, and so on. But it seemed a bit too much focused on pre-determined plans, and have an overlap with my more general notes and task tracking habits. Also, during my trials, it seemed to eat up a lot of processor time when it started up, making other work almost impossible.
  • Project Companion also is quite a beast. It even needs Internet Information Server on my desktop to be useful at all… And then it just didn’t really feel as if it would help: not too responsive in behaviour, and not fully supporting my idea about linking projects, tasks, and activities.
  • The best match so far is iambic’s Time Reporter, the most expensive solution, but with some nice features: importing from my calendar, and the ability to change the data model a bit (switch off milage tracking as I’m not racing around in a car, link projects to clients, and some tasks to specific projects, and the best interface to add new items to lists while I found out what I really want to track).

Agenda and contacts

For a long time, I have used DateBk4 and DateBk5 as my agenda on my Palm. But I was always unhappy about the lack of support at the desktop, and I slowly concluded that I was not really using the full potential of an electronic agenda when I constantly had to either type in all information on my Palm, or enter half the info on the desktop, then sync, and add the other half on my Palm. Things like categories of appointments.

It took me a while to be ready to switch, but now I’m a happy user of Agendus. It really works well on both my desktop and my Treo, and suddenly the contacts database has become much more useful too. The contact history on the Treo even includes entries from the call log.

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Access to the SD Card from the desktop

I intend to use my Treo as a kind of ultra-light weight "laptop" for certain trips. Often I can use some computer in an office or internet cafe for more extensive work. So it would be nice to use the SD Card as a memory stick. Apart from that, being able to directly work with the files on the card from my regular laptop would really help too. With Softick’s CardExport II ($15), this is now reality. Just start the software on the Treo and click "connect".

Before, I also tried the first version of Card Export, and BlueSync by Blue Squirrel also was an interesting product to test. But they both needed software to be installed on the PC, and didn’t really allow me to completely free access to the card.

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Sound recording

As a first post… One of the obvious things is to use the Treo as a voice recorder. It takes a firmware upgrade to make that possible, but then there is a choice of software to use.

All of them record to .wav files, all of them can record directly to the SD Card, all of them allow for different quality levels of recording. As of yet, I don’t need a lot of fancy things, so SoundRec is perfect. Main drawback is that it’s not possible to even check the length of a recording. But as a simple (and free) "sound input tool" it matches my needs.

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Up and running?

Starting to use blogging as a note-taking tool… Let’s see how that works. I’m trying to use the gaim-blogger plugin for Gaim to make this as easy as possible, since I have my instant messaging program open mostly. My data life seems to slowly take shape around a few programs.

  • Firefox as the browser desktop, to surf the net, find things, and develop websites and such.
  • Agendus and Bonsai as contact, time, and task management tools, synchronising nicely with my Treo.
  • Gaim and TheBat as communication tools, for either instant or asynchronous exchange of messages.

Notes and unstructured information still don’t really have a place. Sometimes they end up in Bonsai, sometimes in all kinds of files, and so now perhaps also sometimes here… What I like about the idea to put it here is that I can publish it to my website, and run my personal search engine over bookmarks, notes, writings, etc. So it becomes accessible again in my main "info gathering environment", the browser.