Last week felt chaotic, with kindergarten registration, suture removal, and other family commitments I can no longer remember interrupting my morning work time.
Then last night, my laptop passed from this world into the next. I never even knew it was ailing. Fortunately I’ve learned from my previous computer crashes and now house everything online, so I only freaked out for a minute. Now I’m rockin’ a new and improved laptop and a sense of excitement about starting the next week and bulldozing over an enormous mountain of work.
My last big computer crash was in early 2009, and I lost a lot. But aside from the work-in-progress that disappeared, I lost the spreadsheet I’d been using to track my time. That was far more difficult to recreate than the research paper I’d been writing! Thanks to emails and Google Calendar I was able to piece it back together, but I probably cost myself a couple hundred dollars in hours I wasn’t confident billing, and in time recreating my time sheet.
That’s when I wised up and moved to Google docs.
Manually updating a spreadsheet, then transferring the hours to invoices, is a little clunky. Or a lot clunky. But so far it’s been a great system for me. I can update my time tracking spreadsheet from my mobile phone, and I don’t lose any information when my laptop inevitably dies. I’m on the hunt for a slick web-based time tracking tool with a mobile client, and stumbled on this list of 100 handy tools for freelancers. I’m giddy with excitement over checking out all those links!
