one of the worst things about day to day design tasks is timekeeping against estimates. su and i work on a project-based price, so we don’t necessarily need to do it to actually operate—but it definitely helps me to understand the amount of time i bill against jobs versus time actually spent. case in point: i recently was asked to bid for a job by a client who got a ridiculously cheap piece of work three years ago, when i was simply guessing how much something cost. he didn’t like the price, and ran the other direction—but the end result is that i can now feel safe in waiting for the appropriate client to come along with the appropriate size of budget. we used to jump at anything.

su recently found two mac-based tools to track time and estimates, the rat race and its free dashboard version, the daily grind. both are simple, intuitive, and do exactly what we need.

previously, i used studiometry, which i didn’t like at all. too many features i didn’t care about; the application tries to track client relationships, invoices, timing, and sales processes, all of which is just too much for the application to work well for someone with a very limited amount of time for management. the end result, if you use everything the application suggests, is that you spend all your time working in studiometry. it’s great if you’re a dedicated account person, but who’s a dedicated anything in this day and age?