Time Tips! Double Trouble – Tracking Time in Multiple Places

Do you need to track time at the home and office? Do you use both a laptop and a desktop? Would you like to track on your iPhone as well as at your desk? Here’s how to do it all and stay sane.

You could subscribe to one of the many web-based “time tracking” services. They’re handy to access from different places.  But you’re always dependent upon having a reliable internet connection.  And believe me, that monthly fee quickly adds up.  And, while some of them have little desktop programs that accompany them, they’re often missing nice things like automatically detecting you’ve been away from the computer.

Another option is OfficeTime for the Mac, PC, iPhone and iPad. The good news about OfficeTime is that one desktop license lets you use it personally on several machines without any monthly charge.   And if you buy it for your iPhone, it’s good for your iPad too (or vice versa) without an extra charge.  Let’s look at how to best use OfficeTime on multiple machines.

Option 1 – DropBox

Use Dropbox. (Get a free account at www.dropbox.com)
Set OfficeTime to save your data to DropBox. Use File->Move File (or File-Save As… in old versions) to move your data file.
Go into your OfficeTime preferences and check your name.   You want your name to be the same on each machine.
On your other machines, go into OfficeTime, select File-Open and choose your data file from Dropbox.

IMPORTANT. Quit OfficeTime on one machine before moving to another machine. Why? Because OfficeTime auto saves your file every 10 minutes. That means if you have it open on multiple machines at once, each machine will fight to update the Dropbox file causing you to lose recent data.

What if your forget to quit? Don’t worry. That’s what autobackups are for.  If you’re running OfficeTime 1.6 or better, you’ll automatically be making grandfathered backups.  If you ever think you’ve lost data, go to File-> Show backups.  You can open them up one by one, or an even easier way, is to just import them all.  Use File-Import File… and drag all of your backups in.  Don’t worry. You’ll never get duplicates.  You can even email all of your backups from each machine to yourself and import them in a big mess. OfficeTime will smartly sort it all out for you.

Option 2 – If I email myself, will I go blind?

Too lazy to setup Dropbox?  Yeah, I understand.  Just email your data file to yourself once in a while and import it. For instance, if you work on your desktop and laptop, occasionally email the data file from your laptop to your desktop and use File-Import with the default settings.  It’ll automatically update your desktop with all of your laptop’s activity.  You can also email the file back from your laptop to your desktop the same way. But don’t worry about timings. You don’t have to do it right away.  OfficeTime is smart enough that you can work on both machines and email at any time and the import will take care of everything.

For this to work best, make sure your name in the OfficeTime preferences is the same on each machine.  Note that import syncs all sessions and expenses together.  It doesn’t sync your private project notes or invoicing details.

Option 3 – Tracking time on my iPhone and my desktop

This is the easiest option yet.  OfficeTime will automatically sync everything between your iPhone (or iPad/iPod) and your desktop anytime you come near.  You just need to have both open. We’ll talk in more detail about this in another post.

How do you use OfficeTime? Let us know below.

Time. The real commodity.
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