Time tracking is important — for indie hackers too

Hi, fellow indie hackers, Niels here 👋.

I have been working on Daily, a time tracker for Mac that works by periodically asking what you are doing, since 2013. Back then, I used to work at a digital agency and had to track my hours so my employer could invoice correctly. I tried many time trackers but couldn't get used to manually toggling timers as most of them required. I started developing Daily to scratch my own itch and have always continued improving it.

Nowadays, as a full-time indie developer, nobody is asking me to track time. However, it still helps me in various ways, as it likely will for you. Here's how.

Get the most out of your time

You cannot improve what you cannot measure, and since time might be your most valuable asset (it definitely is mine as a dad of two young kids 😉), let's try not to waste it. By tracking how you spend your time, you can optimize its use. You might, for example, have set the goal to spend more time doing marketing. But are you really? A time tracker will tell you. It introduces another benchmark you can use to evaluate and optimize your business.

Handle procrastination

Procrastination is not always bad, as it's often a signal you should listen to and can learn from. So instead of directly avoiding it, learn to detect and handle it. You can use a distraction blocker like Freedom to block a website or app that you typically use when you procrastinate. As long as not being able to access it rings a bell and lets you think about why you procrastinate. RescueTime is helpful, too, as it analyzes your productivity. And last but not least, Daily could help out too, as periodically accounting for what you are doing helps you keep on track.

Prevent getting a burnout

Burnouts come with various symptoms and might significantly affect you, your company, and the people around you and typically take months of recovery. While using a time tracker doesn't prevent getting burnout directly, it can give you a signal to take things a bit slower. It's easier said than done as a (part-time) solopreneur, yet consistently overworking resulting in burnout is something you should avoid. So how much is too much? First of all, quality matters more than quantity. Someone who believes they are working on something meaningful can typically handle more than someone who thinks they are wasting their time. Yet, research indicated that productivity drops when working more than 50 hours a week, with 55 hours being the point it becomes pointless to keep working.

Invoice client work

The US economy loses 50 million hours in productivity per day because of unrecorded work activities. Of course, not all those hours are directly billable, but it gives an idea of how much money is left on the table. If you invoice clients per hour, utilizing a time tracker to track (and invoice) all billable hours is almost a necessity. Just being able to charge an extra hour you otherwise would have forgotten to charge would likely already pay back the investment of a time tracking app.

Plan your next project properly

Understanding how long a project (phase) or task takes helps you plan the next one correctly. While most indie hackers run ad-hoc and relatively unstructured projects, being able to plan accurately might become handy. For example, when doing (fixed-price) client work or taking investments.

Record your work

I find the ability to record your work the most undervalued advantage of tracking time. It brings benefits in many ways. For example, being able to justify why something took a certain amount of time to a client or investor. Also, governments might require administrating hours for subsidies, tax credits, and deductions. For example, WBSO and zelfstandigenaftrek in The Netherlands.

Apps to track your time

Now that you know why you should track your time as an indie hacker, let's dive into some ways of doing it. Because of the audience, I'll skip explaining why I don't recommend using a pen and paper 😉. Time trackers usually track time in two ways:

• By requiring you to toggle timers whenever you switch tasks. The advantage is that the resulting timesheets are very accurate when used right. But here lies the issue: many (like me) occasionally forget to toggle timers, resulting in inaccurate timesheets. Hence, these time trackers require a good level of discipline. Well-known examples include Toggl, Clockify, and Harvest.

• By monitoring and analyzing, amongst others, the apps you use, documents you work in, web pages you visit, and emails you send. While this results in an almost effortless way of tracking your time, it also impacts your privacy. I specifically wrote almost as no algorithm is capable of 100% properly allocating the right task to the recorded activity. Some post-processing is required to ensure the resulting timesheets reflect reality. Well-known examples include Timely, Timing, and Timemator.

Daily introduces a third way: it periodically asks what you are doing. Inspired by sampling, a popular statistical procedure to conduct scientific research, it accurately tracks your time without needing to toggle timers and without the privacy issues introduced by automatic time trackers. An added benefit is that the periodic reminders help you detect procrastination better.

Do you track time, for what purpose mainly, and using what method or app?

If you are not tracking your time yet, and this post has convinced you to start doing it, check out this article to find out what time tracker to use, depending on your needs and goals.

I hope this has been of any value.

Best and keep hacking 🧑‍💻, Niels.

PS. As a thank you for making it to the end of this post, here are three promo codes for redeeming a lifetime license:

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