Time Tracking with Chrometa

I often get asked if our desktop time tracker is available on mobile devices.  Since it’s not, I try to direct folks to the best of breed time tracker apps on the market.

If you live by your BlackBerry, here’s a list of some of the top rated time tracking apps in BlackBerry App World. Take advantage of these apps to capture your mobile email and telephone time, and get paid for your work on the go.

1. Call Time Tracker by momentem

Price: Free

momentem’s Call Time Tracker is one of the most downloaded business applications for the BlackBerry. It automatically tracks the time you spend on phone calls and mobile email. This app pops up at the end of important calls, letting you quickly tag that call to a client or project so you won’t forget to bill for it. You can tag the time you spend reading or writing emails on your BlackBerry. At the end of the month, you get an Excel sheet of your mobile calls delivered to your inbox, with entries neatly categorized by client/project.

Call Time Tracker - Tagging a call

Call Time Tracker - Call summary

Disclaimer: momemtem is also a Chrometa partner.

2. BlackTrack Lite Activity Management

Price: Free

BlackTrack Lite is a background application for your BlackBerry that produces a complete log of phone/email activity with duration details. The app automatically logs and reports phone and email activity — without any data entry. The activity report is automatically emailed to the user periodically.

BlackTrack Lite Report

BlackTrack Lite App Screenshot

3. Timr

Price: Free

Timr is essentially a BlackBerry timer app that integrates tightly with their multi-user time tracking web app. The BlackBerry app syncs automatically with the web, so all of your time entries are in one place. This application does not do background tracking of phone call and email time. However, you can create many projects and run multiple timers simultaneously. Key differentiating features include Drive Log and Position Tracking.

Timr BlackBerry Interface

Timr Web App

4. Exgis Time Tracker

Price: $4.99

Exgis Time Tracker is a simple timer for tracking your job time. You create time entries either by starting a timer or by manual input. You can export your time in the form of a spreadsheet, which can be sent to you via email.

Exgis Time Tracker - New Time Line

Exgis Time Tracker - View Clients

5. miTimesheet

Price: $3.99

miTimesheet is another BlackBerry only time tracking application that lets you log project time through timers and manual entry. You can export your timesheet to CSV format and it can be delivered to you by email.

miTimesheet - Time Entry

miTimesheet - View TImesheets

Honorable mention: AIRTIME-Manager

We’d be remiss if we didn’t also include an honorable mention of our own – from another Chrometa partner, Airtime Manager makes a solid BlackBerry Time Tracker for attorneys and legal professionals.

Geared towards firms with entrenched billing systems, Airtime Manager integrates smoothly with many of the top legal time and billing software packages.

That wraps up our BlackBerry time tracking app rec’s.  If you’re looking for PC-based time tracking, time management, and productivity software, check out our creations

I am a student of Time Management (or why would I have gotten into to Time Management Software business) and a big part of time management is solving procrastination. We all procrastinate -even those of us who pride ourselves on our time management skills.

From my studies, I like these 7 proven ways to beat procrastination.

1. Do the worst thing first thing: This is known as swallowing the frog first thing and the rest of the day looks good. It gets me through lots of “procrastination” issues.

2. Break it down: Often there are small parts of the task that can be done. Often the reason that we procrastinate is because the task ahead of us is too big. How do you walk 100 miles? One step at a time.

3. Get help. I wasn’t actually referring to delegation (but of course that is good too), I was referring to having someone help you start the task. Often it is the act of starting a task that is enough to get the task done.

4. Do the pleasant part of the task: Often many distasteful and large jobs have some parts to it that are not particular distasteful. Do them so at least you are moving forward on your most important items.

5. 20 minutes: Just spend 20 minutes on a task. I have the attitude that I can spend 20 minutes doing anything. Often by spending the 20 minutes on a task is enough to get the momentum rolling to get it done.

6. Track it: The simple act of tracking process on a goal is often enough to keep the goal moving forward. I like Time Tracking Software for this of course.

7. Reward or punish: The reason we do something is because it is more painful than not doing something, so if we can make a task more rewarding or more painful, then we tend to move forward faster.

Remember that even successful people occasionally procrastinate. And it is solvable.

My good friend Adam Kalsey – Founder of many successful enterprises, including IMified (acquired last year by Voxeo) and SacStarts (Sacramento’s Startup Network) – dishes out some refreshing advice for new entrepreneurs over at the SacStarts blog:

I talk to a great many erstwhile entrepreneurs that tell me all about their ideas and all the things that they’re going to do when they start their company. Or people who have started but aren’t really getting anything done because they can’t find the right co-founder or they need to design every last detail first, or they don’t have the marketing copy for their web site quite right yet.

Entrepreneurs do. We take an idea and a market and drive to make it happen. Figure out what’s standing in the way of you getting stuff done and just go through it. Once you’re actually building your company, a lot of those things that looked insurmountable turn out to be no problem at all.

These are two paragraphs that any aspiring entrepreneur should read over and over again – this is the essence of why so many wannabe companies never get off the ground.  And why so many wannabe entrepreneurs are forever waiting for the stars to align for them to go whole hog after their vision.

Here’s an unfortunate fact of life: The stars will never align.  So if you’re waiting around for a few things to “fall into place”, you’re wasting time.  Just get started and get after it.

As Adam mentions, most problems you’re planning for right now will never come to fruition.  At least 95% of your planning time and energy is likely being wasted.

On the flip side, there are obstacles that you’ll never anticipate until you start off on your journey.  That’s OK – you’ll deal with them as they come.

The important thing is to “fail fast” – if something is not working, stop doing it, and start doing more things that are working.

But – what if nothing is working at all?  That’s OK too – actually it’s completely normal, especially for a startup.  See, you don’t have to be that far off for it to feel like nothing is lining up.

If I may, let me use Chrometa as an example.  One year ago at this time, we had very little working.  Our messaging and value proposition was not connecting with the market – people would go to our website, and wonder what the heck we (and our product) did.  Not good.

Our product itself was a little better.  It had evolved to the stage where trial and beta users would say “I can see where this is going.”

So we kept tweaking everything – our focus, the product itself, our messaging, etc.  It can be a maddening process, quite honestly, because you can make a lot of incremental improvements, and have nothing to show for it.

“How’s the startup going?” is a question people love to ask.  And it’s a question a pre-revenue company usually hates to answer!  Because it’s tough to say things are going well when you don’t yet have a product that people will gladly pay for.

But eventually, it came together for us.  We defined who we were.  We kept honing the product (and continue to do so).  And eventually things started to click.

Moral of the story – inaction is the enemy of the entrepreneur.  Get moving today.  You’ll figure out what works, what doesn’t (that’ll be a real long list initially), and most importantly, you’ll be able to go from there and start building something of real value.

We’re excited to announce that we are now providing free licenses of Chrometa for law students!

The idea spawned from a conversation that we were having with the fine folks who run Social Media Law Student. We were originally planning to offer a steep discount on Chrometa for students in their listening audience…and then I started thinking back to my days as a student (which were not too long ago).

I was always broke (some would argue I still am!) Why not just make it free. So there you go – if you’re in law school, here’s how you can get a free copy of Chrometa:

1. Download the free trial of our time tracking software.
2. Send us an email from your school email address (.edu)
3. We’ll send you a complimentary license code back!

It yours to keep – we hope that it’s of use to you in law school, and of course we’d encourage you to use Chrometa when you land your first gig.  The partners will be in awe of how many billable hours you rack up

And we ALWAYS appreciate your referrals – please refer Chrometa to friends and family who you think will benefit from it using this form: http://www.chrometa.com/refer-us.php

They’ll thank you – and so will we!

We were honored and delighted to be interviewed by Rob Ameerun, Founder and Owner of Legal IT Professionals, to kick off a cool new podcast series they are launching.

Rob and I chatted for twelve minutes about legal time capture, Chrometa’s history and plans, and trends that we see for 2010 and beyond.  You can listen to the audio of our interview here:

http://www.legalitprofessionals.com/index.php/News/ten-minutes-with-brett-owens.html