Track Your Time – Without Notes or Timers

By Neil Squillante

Late last year, Business Insider, a publication that breathlessly covers startup companies and new technologies, admitted that the world is not changing that fast. The article noted that every minute people post 695,000 Facebook status updates (impressive), but send 168 million email messages (off the charts). Among lawyers, the numbers are likely even more skewed in email’s favor. Because lawyers spend so much time in email, that’s where they lose the most billable time. Did you spend 25 minutes or 35 minutes replying to your client? Most lawyers are honest so they under-guesstimate, but accuracy is not a crime. The new version of a popular time tracking program can help.

Chrometa 2012 … in One Sentence
Chrometa 2012 automatically captures and categorizes the time you spend working on your computer plus it can track offline time too.

The Killer Feature
Previous versions of Chrometa would tell you how much time you spent in Outlook or in Gmail throughout the day, enabling you to capture all that time. But it didn’t list the time per message so if you read 25 work-related email messages, and sent 10 you’d have to look back at your messages and apportion the time among them — a fair amount of work.

Chrometa 2012 now shows you the time spent per message, identifying each message by subject line, to/from/cc fields, and if applicable even the email folder name.

Chrometa achieves this feat via two free plugins for Microsoft Outlook and Gmail respectively. The Outlook plugin works with Outlook 2007 and 2010, while the Gmail plugin works with Google’s Chrome browser on Mac and Windows.

“Our new Chrometa plugins for Microsoft Outlook and Gmail close the loop on email,” Chrometa CEO Brett Owens told us. “Once you install our email plugins, you’ll never lose another minute of billable email time or waste time reconstructing that billable time.”

Other Notable Features
Chrometa captures time on Macs and PCs. It notices when you stop using your computer such as for a phone call and can ask you about it so you can also track offline time. You access and manage your captured time using a web browser.

Chrometa can automatically categorize the time it captures. For example, now that Chrometa can capture time spent per email message, you can create a rule for each client or even matter. Then Chrometa will place all email time per client or per matter into that category. The rules work for all the time Chrometa captures (e.g., time spent in Word documents). When you log into your Chrometa account, you can convert all the time captured in a category into time entries with one click.

Also new in Chrometa is the ability to create bills (invoices). In other words, Chrometa can now serve as your billing program, not just your time capture program. You can send bills directly from Chrometa via email or export them into DOC, PDF, or XLS formats.

If you already use a billing system, Chrometa offers a growing number of integrations, including Clio, FreshBooks, QuickBooks, PCLaw, and Timeslips. You can also export Chrometa time entries and import them into virtually any billing system.

What Else Should You Know?
You can choose from three versions of Chrometa (all single user) or from two versions of Chrometa for Teams (for multiple users). Pricing for Chrometa starts at $19 per month, whereas pricing for Chrometa for Teams starts at the same price per user per month.

Please download Chrometa’s automatic time tracking software here.

Last week, we co-hosted a webinar with our friends at Clio to demo our new automatic time capture integration.

Here’s the full webinar recording, for your viewing pleasure:

The New Chrometa-Clio Time Capture Integration

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Clio to deliver a seamless time capture and practice management experience for solo and small firm attorneys.

You can now let Chrometa capture and categorize your time automatically, and then port these time entries directly into Clio with a single click.

How to Enable the Clio Integration

Within Chrometa, go to the Account – Integrations tab, and select the Clio Integration option from the drop down menu.

Click Connect to hook up your Clio account with Chrometa.

Enable Clio Export from Chrometa

You’ll be redirected over to Clio, where you can login and connect your account.

Connect Clio Account

Select Yes, Let’s Connect:

Sync Up Your Clio Matter (Project) List

Next you’ll be redirected back to Chrometa, with a message that you’ve connected your Clio account, and that you’re ready to import your Matters from Clio via the Project tab in Chrometa (we call Matters “Projects” in Chrometa).

At the top of the page, you’ll see a new Sync With Clio button. Click this to import your clients and matters from Clio (they will be created as Clients and Projects in Chrometa).

Chrometa will pull in any Clio matters that are not yet present within Chrometa. No existing Chrometa projects will be overwritten – new projects are only appended – so you don’t need to worry about accidentally overwriting your existing Chrometa project list.

Use Chrometa to Capture, Categorize, and Annotate Your Time

Now you can use Chrometa to:

• Capture your time passively as you work
• Categorize these time entries to your Clio Matters
• Annotate (and combine) time entries (to provide additional details and combine like annotations)

Export Your Time Entries to Clio

Once you have your time entries categorized, you can send them across the wire to Clio from the Time – Summary view. First, select your project(s) to export:

Then click the Export to Clio button:

Export to Clio Button

Some quick notes and tips:

• The time range selected using Chrometa’s date filter can be used to send multiple days’ worth of time entries across to Clio.
• Chrometa will group all time entries by annotation (like annotations will be combined into one entry), and will split the entries into a total by day (if multiple days are selected).
• Only time entries that have been categorized to a project will be sent across to Clio. Uncategorized time will not be sent.
• For entries that are not annotated, you can give them a default annotation before selecting Begin Export (see window below).
• Finally all time entries sent to Clio are appended to your list of Billable Activity for each matter. We do not replace any entries that already exist in Clio.

Export to Clio One Click Popup

Feedback Welcome

We collaborated closely with our friends at Clio to deliver as seamless an integration as possible. We welcome and appreciate your feedback and suggestions on this process.

We’ve been busy working on Chrometa upgrades and enhancements – here’s a quick update on what’s new (and a preview of what’s coming soon, too!)

New Integrations – Clio and Rocket Matter

Our new integrations with Clio and Rocket Matter have been a big hit with solo and small firm attorneys. Both exports are setup so that you can send your time across the wire with a single click of the mouse.

Export to Clio Button

Export to Rocket Matter Button

And here’s our full list of integrations and exports.

Faster Site

We rolled out some big performance upgrades to make the site faster – hopefully quite a bit faster. These upgrades should especially help when viewing and categorizing a week’s worth, or even a month’s worth, of time at once.

Upgraded Time Collector

We have new and improved time collectors for Windows and Mac. They have been thoroughly battle tested for accuracy and reliability, and you’ll notice that we sync time entries faster (now every 15 minutes).

Firewall and network issues should also now largely be handled without a problem.

To upgrade your data collector, just exit the version you’re running locally on your PC or Mac. Then you can download the latest from our homepage at www.chrometa.com.

(Note for Mac users: You may need to delete previous Chrometa applications, which are likely stored in your Downloads folder).

New Reports for Finding Unbilled Time

We replaced the previous Dashboard with new Reports that we think will be more useful. Click the Reports tab to view them.

We’re especially excited about the Find Unbilled Time report, which will allow you to view which days you have uncategorized time for – and click to that day directly by clicking the bar in the report.

Find Unbilled Time Report

Coming Soon: Automatic “Noise” Filtering for More Continuous Time Entries

As you know, Chrometa literally tracks time down to the second. While this is a big strength of our product, it also poses a serious challenge to all of us, as we have many little “transition” entries that need to be handled.

So, we’re working on a way of handling these, with the goal of attaching these “transitional” entries onto larger “real” ones. For example, if you’re typing an email, and you skip over to Pandora for a few seconds, you may just want that Pandora time grouped into the email. We’re working on a way to do this for you.

(Until then, you can currently Annotate multiple entries, which will then combine them for exports and invoices).

Add Annotation Popup

If you haven’t yet taken a spin through our new Help section, which contains many how-to articles and videos, please check it out here.

Questions and Feedback

Since launching Chrometa 1.1 in March 2009, we’ve always received our best product ideas from you. (As an aside, it’s probably a good thing we didn’t know then how tough it would be to engineer passive time capture – oh the ignorance and excitement of youth!)

If you have specific questions or feedback, please reply to this email. While we of course don’t implement every single feature request, we do listen to all requests and feedback (implicit and explicit) to gear our future development.

Dear Fellow Attorney:

Like you, I hate keeping track of my billable time. I used to spend hours each week going through sent emails, my calendar and my notes to figure out what I did every day.

I knew there had to be a better answer than notepads and start/stop timers.

The problem with the start/stop timer, for me, is that I’m constantly getting interrupted throughout the day.  So I’d start the timer once in the morning – and realize 5 hours later it’d be running against the same task ever since, because I forgot to toggle it!

Time entry methods were equally ineffective – I am far too busy and multi-task far too much during the day to be bothered with the tedious effort of creating a new time entry when I change tasks.

Finally in 2007, I’d had enough – so I designed a product that’d automatically track my time and let me easily organize that time so I could accurately and easily bill my clients.

I’m excited to announce that our groundbreaking timekeeping product, Chrometa, is now available.

You can get started with Chrometa for free – and be up and running in a matter of minutes.

Please start capturing your billable time automatically with Chrometa now. (Available for PC and Mac)

Welcome This Week in Web Design viewers!  We’re excited to partner with ThisWeekIn for this contest.  Please complete this short form below to enter for a chance to win.

Official Rules: This Week in Web Design & Chrometa iPad Giveaway

And don’t forget to download your free trial of Chrometa here.

Getting through your to-do list faster isn’t what time management is actually about – at least not anymore. After all, this is the digital era, baby!

You have a handheld supercomputer sitting in your pocket, a nonstop barrage of interruptions, and more expected of you than would have been expected of three accounting professionals a mere twenty years ago.

Rather than managing our existing allocation of time as if it was finite, we need to find ways to make our share of time larger, preferably by a multiple of two or more. Forget the modest notion of merely getting things done. We need to do better, and we can if we employ some “radical” strategies.

Strategy 1: Focus Intensely on the Single-Most Important Item

What you really need to do is to look at everything on your list, pick the single-most important thing, and then work on it, uninterrupted, until it’s completed.

The uninterrupted part is the toughest, by far. While it’s easy and tempting to check your e-mail, answer the phone, respond to an instant message, or click over to a Web site, if you can eliminate the interruptions, you’ll boost your productivity significantly and be able to work the same or even fewer hours.

No, you’re not squeezing thirty hours into a twenty-four-hour day. Instead, you’re making sure two things happen:

First, you’re working on the single-most important task at hand – not the most urgent task or the easiest one – the most important one. Don’t mistake this for putting out the biggest fire – emergencies are one thing, getting your most important task done is another. Most of the time – if we even have the time – we plow through our to-do lists without questioning whether it makes a difference if we complete most of tasks or not. The sad truth is this: It doesn’t matter. The 80/20 rule tells us that 80 percent of our results will come from 20 percent of our input. By picking the single-most important task to work on, we’re making sure that this action falls within the critical 20 percent.

Second, by focusing 100 percent of our energies on the single-most important item, we’ll accomplish it much faster than we would’ve if we’d allowed ourselves to be distracted by interruptions, or worse, tried to multitask and complete two or three items at once.

Interruptions are the real killer. It’s amazing how fast you can get something done, if that’s the only thing you do.

Strategy 2: Automate Everything – and I Mean Everything

Everything that’s being done manually in your office or when you work remotely needs to be given a good hard look. We’re on the eve of 2012. At long last, software is actually starting to work!

The dirty secret few software industry providers want you to know is that adoption rates – and I’m talking about adoption rates on anything – are actually pretty dismal. I believe that’s the case because most business software has traditionally been quite complex, requiring a lot of adoption, training, and wrangling on the part of the user. The result? We ultimately opt for a simple solution like Word, Excel, and perhaps QuickBooks to manage a practice.

If you’ve written off software for years – and trust me, you’re not alone – now is actually a good time to take a look around. Here are a few key business processes you can easily automate to help expand your available productive time:

Accounting: QuickBooks Online is good alternative to QuickBooks desktop. With QuickBooks Online, you can log in to your clients’ accounts directly without the need to send files back and forth. If you’re up for considering alternatives to the QuickBooks universe altogether, you might want to start your search with upstart Xero, an online accounting software program.

Time and billing: Our friend Dustin Wheeler, CPA, of Wallace Neumann & Verville, LLP, just wrote about a sweet time and billing hookup between my beloved time tracking app Chrometa and our invoicing partner FreshBooks. Check out Wheeler’s simple process for time tracking and invoicing here.

Project management: We use two products for project management. First, WorkFlowy is a great, free app for keeping a bullet point list you can share with your colleagues. It’s essentially a whiteboard on a Web page, which is often all you need for good project management. For more collaborative bells and whistles, such as milestone tracking and file sharing, check out Basecamp, the most popular project management app for small business.

E-mail marketing: I’m a huge fan of sending out a monthly e-mail newsletter. I believe it’s the highest leverage marketing activity you can do. More leverage gives us more time. If you’re new to e-mail marketing, the easiest tools to get started with, in my experience, are MailChimp and Constant Contact. Both make it easy to import your existing contacts and get started. I highly recommend you put this on the top of your marketing to-do list.

Strategy 3: Ditch (Most) of Your Social Media Efforts

If you think this idea is controversial, you probably need to be reading this. Are you actually getting anything from your social media efforts, or do you just feel busy?

Don’t confuse effort with effectiveness. If you’re not tracing new clients back to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, maybe it’s time to dial back or outright ax the time you put into social media.

I speak from experience. At Chrometa, we don’t use social media as a lead-generation tool because we found it doesn’t work! I think social media is a great way to interact with clients and colleagues and to engage in conversation. It’s fine as a virtual watercooler, but it’s a big-time sink in terms of business development.

The Bottom Line

Remember when outsourcing was all the rage? Well, computers have come a long way, overtaking humans in a wide range of tasks. This is a very good thing for the enterprising professional. You can command a workforce much larger than your current one for the low monthly price of most software offerings.

Whether you consider outsourcing as part of your plans for 2012, the bottom line is simple. Eliminating your interruptions, automating your busywork, and reducing your social media burn should help you grow your total productive time – and make your work more fun and fulfilling to boot.

Take baby steps. If you only have the bandwidth to adopt one of the three time-saving strategies in this article, then go for one and tackle the others in succession. Make yourself a list of goals and stick to it!

Want to automate your timekeeping?  Click here for a free 14-day trial of Chrometa’s automatic time tracking software.

Welcome Taming the E-mail Beast webinar attendees!  Please fill out this form to receive your free Chrometa bonus, courtesy of Randy Dean!

THREE FREE MONTHS of computerized time-tracking software from Chrometa – one of the industry leaders in time tracking and analysis for business professionals.

Chrometa captures your time automatically for you – without you having to write it down, or start/stop a timer. Every email you write, document you work on, and website you visit is tracked for you by Chrometa – it’s like having your very own personal timekeeper.(“no need to start and stop the program, does it automatically for you!”) – an $89 value!

If the embedded form doesn’t appear, please use this link to collect your bonus.

Today Jose and Aure answer the question: “How do I build the perfect website?” Aure and I will share 3 projects with you and tell you how they did it!

Chrometa is product to sponsor This Week in Web Design!

What apps are on your holiday wish list? On this edition of Legal ToolKit, host Jared Correia, Law Practice Management Advisor with Mass. LOMAP,  joins returning guest Brett Owens, CEO and

legal-toolkit-practice-management

Co-Founder of Chrometa, LLC, to take a look at some of the top web apps for this holiday season. Brett offers up his favorite apps across a variety of categories, including for collaboration and file sharing. In addition to relaying his thoughts about the best buffalo wings on the planet, Brett makes some bonus prognostications for 2012 and beyond.

Legal ToolKit: Top Web Apps for the Holidays

So you’re building a new app – and you’ve got it working decently enough. Maybe it’s not going to set the world on fire (just yet), but hey, it feels pretty good to have advanced beyond a buggy skeleton of a product that’s held together by chewing gum and duct tape!

You probably know you’ve got to get some real users on this thing in order to get some product validation and feedback, so that you can recalibrate and align your product dev efforts with real user needs. It’s time to go above and beyond your cool ideas that have carried you this far.

But how exactly do you go about getting these initial beta users? You know, the early adopters with the keen eyes who can walk you through a day in their lives, share their maddening “pain point” with you, and (of course) patiently deal with a few bugs?

We faced this hurdle in 2008, and I’ve got to admit, it was a big effort to recruit people who would actively and passionately use our app, give us unfiltered feedback, and yeah, put up with their fair share of product bugs too!

That first beta recruitment process is a tough one. Here’s how we did it, as I hope that our lessons learned are helpful to you if you’re going through this process the first time.

What Types of Beta Users Do You Need?

Last week, an early stage entrepreneur asked me if we recruited our friends and family to beta test our app. We did, but in general, unless you’ve got friends and/or family members who specifically fit the profile of your target customer, I’d recommend moving beyond this friendly audience as soon as you can.

While our friends and family members were very kind in walking through the setup process, honestly that’s about where the usefulness of their testing ended. Why? Because they were running our app as a favor – not because they needed it.

And there is a HUGE difference between folks who run your app as a favor, and folks who run it because they desperately need it. You need the latter!

When we connected with folks who really needed our app (in our case, professionals who need to keep very close track of their time, like lawyers), that’s when we started getting very valuable “on the ground” insights from real users.

But what if you can’t readily find anyone in your target market? Better keep looking – because you’ll need to find them eventually if your product is going to succeed anyway!

Two Ways to Recruit Initial Beta Users

To locate these “must have” users to beta test, you can:

1. Have people contact you, tell you they love your idea/product, and offer to beta test it for you
2. Reach out to prospective beta users in your target market, and see if they’d like to beta test your app

How to Get People to Come to You

We had a pretty good website up before we had a pretty good product – which is probably the sequence you want to follow as well. At minimum, I’d recommend getting a simple one-page website (or better yet, blog) up as soon as you can.

The big benefit here is that people can now find you. You’re not going to see a ton of traffic, but you may be able to figure out a creative SEO angle to rank high for a long tail keyword or two.

With Google increasingly focused on delivering relevant search results to its users, I’ve noticed they are throwing more love to niche sites that more perfectly fit the users’ search term. And, the trend in search behavior is that people are typing in longer phrases, thanks to their ever-increasing faith in the almighty Google algorithm.

Going back to our case, we were fortunate enough to rank for phrases like “automatic time tracking software” fairly soon after getting our site up. While not many folks search on this (you’d never fill a sales pipeline with search volume from this alone), the people who do use this term very well know what they’re looking for! And we’re after quality over quantity anyway (more on that later).

When a prospective user found our site, and saw what our product did (or was supposed to do, at least!), some were interested enough to contact us about beta testing. So make sure you have an obvious contact form and/or contact info!

You could also sponsor search terms via Google AdWords. Common phrases can be quite expensive (especially in the B2B world) – but if you again think “long tail” search terms, you may be able to get a few relevant clicks for not that much dough.

In a perfect world, this step would provide you with more eager beta users than you’d ever dreamed of. But since this may not happen, let’s see what you’ll need to do if (and more likely, when) you need to press the issue and make something happen yourself.

How to Reach Out to Potential Beta Users

It’s time to roll up your sleeves and starting going outbound to potential beta users in your target market. Don’t worry, this doesn’t actually involve cold calling. Cold emailing, yes, but that’s no sweat.

Here’s the playbook I used (and still use, actually) to reach out to people about beta testing:

1. Hop on LinkedIn and search for fellow alumni who are professionals in our target market
2. Find the email address of the person I wanted to reach (usually you can either grab this from their LinkedIn profile, or from their company webpage)
3. Send them a nice intro email like this one:

Dear Mike,

I’m a fellow PCU grad, working on a new software startup. I’d like to ask your advice, if I may, about a new product we’re developing to help attorneys with their timekeeping efforts.

I’d greatly appreciate the opportunity to pick your brain for a few minutes, and get your take on the problem we’re trying to solve. Any advice you have based on your experience and expertise in the legal profession would be most helpful.

Thanks in advance,

Brett Owens ENG ‘03 (School/Class Year)

When Mike graciously replies to our email, we’ll setup a few minutes to chat and ask him for his advice. People love giving advice, and they rarely turn down an opportunity to share wisdom – especially with regards to their area of expertise (which is exactly what we’re asking for, as a bright and eager entrepreneur!)

Brief aside – most people’s everyday lives are really not that exciting. Perhaps manageable, perhaps passively interesting – but there’s not much in the way of outright excitement. This is important, because being contacted by a fellow alumni working on a startup venture is actually pretty cool!

When you connect with Mike by phone, ask him for his insights about the problem you are trying to solve. In our case, this is where I’d ask if timekeeping was a pain for him.

Hey Mike – how do you reconcile your time at the end of the week? Would you mind walking me through a day/week in your work life here? Appreciate your take on this – especially anything that you believe could be done to improve the process.

Then we let Mike talk. And if it turns out this is a problem he struggles with – bingo!

OK thanks Mike, that’s very helpful. We’re actually working on a product that may help with the headaches you face every Friday evening when you try to track down how you spent your time during the past week. Would you be interested in taking it for a beta test spin when we have something ready?

More likely than not, Mike’s going to say yes. Which gives us a new star beta tester, and gives Mike hope for his weekly headache!

How Many Initial Beta Users Do You Really Need?

Not that many, really – focus on quality over quantity. You want a wide enough cross section of users who will give you a solid breadth of feedback – but not too many that you get overwhelmed.

In our initial stages, we had a very solid group of 5 beta users. They were great, and we were able to give each person individualized attention and support. As long as you’re getting regular, detailed feedback from your beta testers, a small number like 5 or 10 can be plenty.

If you can get a small number of people to love your app, you can get a large number of people crazy about it too. Take your time initially, get the product fit right, and you can then scale up your beta from there.

Best of luck in recruiting your initial group of lucky beta users!

Ed. note: We originally drafted this piece for SacStarts.com – Sacramento’s technology startup hub.