Keep track of time

Having difficulty tracking the time you spent on each task and booking your hours? SlimTimer is here to help.

SlimTimer is a free web application (accepting donations) that lets you create and run tasks so you know exactly how much time you spent on each one. You can also tag tasks, which is very useful if you want to run advanced reports. For example, you could tag your tasks by project, billable vs. non billable, by type - see how much time you spent on management, meetings, development, etc.

It is basically a more advanced to do list, where you know how your time is being used and how. To start counting the time spent on a task you just click on it and it is equally easy to stop it, providing a very streamlined experience.

You can run it in a browser sidebar (in Internet Explorer and Firefox), on a popup window or, even better yet, in your Windows tray with Bubbles (another neat program).

SlimTimer has other nice features like sharing and being able to use its API to manage tasks.

Mobile app

Unfortunately there isn't any official SlimTimer mobile application. What you can do is a create a bookmark to slimtimer.com/client - this points directly to the timer client. The only downside is that the timer doesn't resize properly to the screen, at least in the default Android browser, so you end up having to scroll.

An unofficial native application is available for both iOS and Android. Both mTimer for iOS and mTimer for Android are built by the same author and seem to share the same functionality. The app for Android doesn't have a good score right now (3.3 out of 5) and isn't updated that often, so don't expect a bulletproof experience.

Alternative

An alternative to SlimTimer is Toggl. I have to be honest, I haven't tried Toggl yet, because SlimTimer is simple enough and I have been using it for a while, but Toggl seems a very nice application and well supported. With versions available for Windows (desktop), Chrome, iOS and Android, as well as widgets for iGoogle/Gmail and integration with several services including Basecamp, Toggl seems a alternative to consider.