How to · 3 min read
Billable hours are the ones a client pays for. Tracking them well is less about discipline and more about setting things up so nothing slips through.
Deliverable design & code, client meetings, project email threads, and scope revisions.
Accounting, chasing invoices, sales proposals, coffee breaks, and personal browsing.
Before tracking anything, agree with yourself, and ideally with each client, what is billable. Direct work on a deliverable almost always is. Calls, email about the project and revisions often are. Your own admin, invoicing and business development usually are not. Writing this down once saves arguing with yourself every Friday.
The easiest time to lose is the short block: a ten-minute call, a quick fix, a reply that turned into half an hour. The fix is to record the whole day first and decide what was billable afterwards, rather than deciding up front which moments are worth recording.
An automatic time tracker does this for you by recording which app or site you were in and when. Without one, a simple log with the time next to each switch works, if you keep it up.
Hustled boots with Windows and automatically associates active windows with client projects. You recover 2-4 forgotten hours every week without taking intrusive screenshots.
A week is short enough that you still remember what each block was. Go through the recorded time, assign each block to a client or project, and set aside anything that was not billable. A month later, the same review turns into guesswork.
Time away from the computer should not end up billed to whatever was open when you left. Check your records for long gaps and decide deliberately whether each one was work, such as a call away from the desk, or a break.
Running a manual timer that stays on over lunch creates awkward explanations when invoicing. Passive tracking with automatic idle detection guarantees your invoice matches honest, defensible work.
Once you know how many hours you actually bill in a week, compare it with the hours you assumed when you set your rate. If the real number is lower, the rate needs to rise to reach the same income. Use our free Hourly Rate Calculator and Timesheet Calculator to check your arithmetic.
Hustled starts with Windows and records on its own, tidies the day into real blocks, and matches each block to the right client or project. You look it over, fix anything it got wrong, and export a CSV timesheet. Idle time is set aside, never padded into the job you had open.
Hustled starts with Windows, notices what you work on, and writes your timesheet automatically.
Manual timers, timesheets from memory, or automatic time tracking? What each approach gets right and wrong, and how to choose for freelance or agency work.
Hustled, Rize, Timely, Memtime, Toggl Track and Clockify compared on price, free trials, automatic tracking and where your data is stored, from each pricing page.