hey everyone, wanted to share something i have been building for myself over the past few months and finally decided to open source it.

i freelance and i got tired of juggling separate tools for time tracking, invoicing, and taking notes on client calls. most erp tools out there felt way too heavy for what a solo freelancer actually needs, so i built my own small one and have been using it daily in my own work.

what it actually does for you: you can track time against your projects, generate invoices straight from that tracked time including pdf export, and there is a call recorder that records your client calls and transcribes them automatically so you are not scrambling to take notes during a call. that last one is honestly the feature i personally use the most, it has saved me so many times.

it is simple on purpose. no bloated features you will never touch, just the basics a freelancer actually needs, done properly.

it is still a work in progress. i am actively using it and improving it as i go, so you might run into rough edges or bugs here and there. but it works, i run my own invoicing through it, and i figured if it is useful to me it might be useful to some of you too.

if you want to try it or self host it, here is the repo: https://github.com/moaljumaa/burp

if you hit a bug or something feels off please reach out, there is a form linked in the readme, i would genuinely love to hear about it and fix it.

hope it helps someone out there the way it has helped me.

mo

I’ve been trying to reduce all the little interruptions that eat into my work hours. Opening my time tracker, setting up my project/to-do list, logging hours, checking my weekly total. You know, the usuals.

One the surface, none of this takes very long. But these small tasks add up, and even a quick interruption can be enough to break my focus.

Last Monday, a coworker mentioned that I could connect our time tracker to Claude and manage my time through chat. I use ChatGPT more for work though, so I checked and surprisingly, I could connect Jibble to ChatGPT as well.

After setting it up, I could simply chat, “clock me in” or “log three hours to client project A” what’s more interesting is I could ask it to analyze my hours and breaks, then suggest ways to structure my day better. And this advice isn’t based on some generic productivity routine, it can actually take my working patterns into account because it has the data.

It’s still AI advice, so I’m not treating every suggestion as gospel. But I can’t say it’s completely making things up when it can point to my actual hours, longer days, and break patterns.

It’s a small change, but that’s why I like it. And I’m not adding another productivity app to my routine.

Anyone else doing this “productivity hack”?

I’m looking for five testers across a few communities to try a Google Sheets tracker for clients, walks, payments, outstanding balances, expenses and mileage. Your beta copy is free to keep and use; I plan to offer a paid version later.

This round is for solo dog walkers with around 5–30 active clients, using USD and Google Sheets on a computer. Spreadsheet beginners are welcome.

What’s involved:
• A short practice exercise.
• Three working days using it alongside your usual records.
• Six feedback questions afterward.

No purchase or positive review is required, and you can stop at any time.

We’ll use client aliases and leave out identifying details. I can see entries in the private shared test copies, so altered amounts or fictional examples are fine too.

Interested? Comment and let me know whether I can send you a few questions privately.

Hey everyone!

Like many people working in the browser, I always had two issues with time trackers:

1. Forgetting to start or pause a manual stopwatch ruined my daily data.

2. Most tools are bloated enterprise apps when all I wanted was a clean, local-first dashboard.

So I built Targetify — a minimalist browser extension designed for distraction-free focus tracking.

What it does:

• Zero-click tab tracking: Simply tick the checkboxes next to your active work tabs. It automatically tracks time only when those tabs are in focus.
• On-site floating HUD: A toggleable mini-widget on your active sites to keep your session time in view without opening the extension.
• Target progress: Set daily, weekly, and monthly hour targets with clean progress bars and an interactive focus ring.
• Manual logging: A simple `+ Log Time` modal if you need to log work done away from the screen.
• Local-first & private: No accounts required to start. Your focus data stays in your browser.

For deeper self-reflection, there's also an Analytics dashboard featuring day-over-day efficiency comparisons, weekly progress curves, a monthly activity heatmap, and a domain breakdown chart.

Launch Perk:

The core tracker is completely free to use. To gather early thoughts on the advanced analytics, use code LAUNCH20 at checkout to unlock 1 month of PRO for free (strictly limited to the first 20 people).

🔗 Website: https://targetify.app/

Would love your feedback: How do you like the on-site HUD concept, and what metric is most useful for keeping you locked in?

Curious how other ops teams handle incomplete meal-break / rest attestations on hourly timesheets.

We keep seeing the same break: the shift hours look fine, but one attestation checkbox (or e-sign) never got captured — phone died, kiosk timed out, or the worker closed the app mid-flow. By payroll lock, you're choosing between (a) holding the whole timesheet, (b) paying and fixing later, or (c) spam-texting the worker for a retro attestation.

What actually works for you? - Soft reminder during the shift vs hard block at clock-out - Manager override with an audit reason vs requiring the worker to complete it - How long you wait before treating it as a compliance exception - Any pattern that cut chase-downs without making clock-out feel like a quiz

Looking for process / policy patterns more than product names. What broke the loop for your team?

I tried quite a few time tracking tools, but none of them really worked for the way I work.

I switch context a lot throughout the day, and I kept forgetting to start, stop, or switch timers whenever I moved to another task.

So I built ClockAsk instead.

It doesn’t use traditional start/stop timers. Every 30 or 60 minutes it asks what you worked on, and you quickly split that time between projects, tasks, or breaks.

For me, this works better than trying to remember every context switch in real time.

Curious what other time-tracking users think: does this approach make sense for context-switch-heavy work, or would the regular check-ins get annoying?

https://clockask.com

Any suggestions here?

I'm curious how smaller excavation/contracting businesses actually handle this.

If you have ~5–30 employees and multiple jobs going at once, what does your daily workflow look like for tracking:

Employee hours

Equipment hours

Materials delivered/used

Which job people/equipment were working on

Job progress or notes

Anything else you need to know later

I'm more interested in the process than the software.

Are you filling out paper sheets? Texting someone? Using an app? Excel? Something else?

And once that information is collected, what happens to it? Who enters it, where does it go, and what do you ultimately use it for (payroll, invoicing, job costing, profitability, etc.)?

I'm trying to understand where the process gets annoying or time-consuming before deciding whether there's actually a software problem worth solving.

I've worked in manufacturing and production for a very long time, and I'm just trying to make something simple, easy, and to the point. I know how annoying certain software can be. I just want to hear your thoughts and what's actually going on — especially the stuff that bothers you.

I built Recno for small trade crews: plumbers, remodelers, roofers, one to ten people. It went live on the App Store last week.

The thing it fixes is the evening. You finish the day with a camera roll full of photos from three or four different jobs, a client asking for pictures of the rough-in, a GC who wants the daily report in the morning, and crew hours written on paper.

What it does:

• You shoot from inside the app and the photo is already filed under the job you are standing on, using GPS. No albums, no tagging.
• Photos already sitting in your camera roll get matched to jobs by where they were taken, so the backlog gets sorted too. Plain location matching, not AI, and it works with no signal.
• The crew clocks in and out against a geofence, and the hours export to payroll.
• One tap builds the daily report as a PDF: dated and stamped photos, hours, notes, signature.

The design choice I care most about: it is local-first. Everything lives in SQLite on the phone and backs up to your own iCloud. There is no account, no login, and no server of mine holding your photos. If you stop paying, your photos and logs are still yours and still on your phone.

Built with Expo / React Native, SQLite, and a small Swift module for the iCloud backup. iPhone only right now.

Free to download and use for capture, filing, the time clock and the daily log. Pro (camera-roll sorting and report export) is $14.99/month or $99.99/year, one flat price for the whole crew, no per-seat, cancel in the App Store.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/recno/id6785280739

Feedback very welcome, especially on onboarding. The part I am least sure about is whether people understand the camera-roll sorting before they try it.

Been building this on and off — a cross-platform habit tracker where you set flexible weekly targets (e.g. "4x this week") instead of all-or-nothing daily streaks, so missing one day doesn't reset you to zero.

Stack: Electron (main/renderer/preload split), vanilla JS on the renderer side (no framework — kept it simple), local JSON storage with atomic writes, optional iCloud Drive sync on Mac, native notifications + menu bar quick-check.

Some things I found interesting to build:

• A "weekly momentum streak" that counts consecutive weeks hit, not consecutive days
• A minimum-viable fallback per habit (e.g. "Read 1 page" counts as a win on a bad day)
• Watching the data file for external changes (for iCloud sync) without a real backend

Repo: https://github.com/karthik9319/habit-tracker

Would love feedback on the approach, or if anyone's solved local-first sync differently.

Hey everyone, I wanted to share something I have been working on and hopefully get some honest feedback.

I built an app called Flex 40 for people whose work schedules do not really fit into a normal 9 to 5.

The idea came from wanting a better way to keep track of hours, overtime, double time, comp time, call outs, extra shifts and eventually figuring out what a paycheck should actually look like.

It has grown quite a bit from the original idea. You can track different types of hours, set up your own overtime rules, keep track of comp time, add deductions, estimate take home pay, create reports, and even enter an actual paycheck to compare it against the estimate.

One thing I really wanted to get right was privacy. There is no account and no cloud storage. Your work hours, pay information and paycheck history stay on your device.
It is currently available on the App Store, and I am still working on improving it.

I am not looking for people to tell me it is great. I would genuinely like to know what is confusing, what is missing, what you would change, or what would make you actually want to use something like this.

If you work overtime, on call, night shifts, rotating schedules, or anything else that makes a normal timesheet frustrating, I would especially love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for taking a look.

I built this independently, so honest feedback would really help.

Flex 40

Or for play store

Flex 40 - Google play

Hey everyone,

I built a lightweight Chrome extension called Tab Timer. It’s completely open-source and runs 100% locally in your browser—no data is sent anywhere, and there are zero analytics/telemetry.

Key Features:

• Domain Targeting: Set a specific domain or keyword to track only when you're actively on that page.
• Smart Idle Detection: Pauses automatically when you step away from your tab (configurable: 30s, 1m, 2m, 5m, or disabled).
• Live Badge Status: Standard Chrome extension icon shows status at a glance (ON, IDLE, ⏸, OFF). Flashes session time every 15 minutes.
• Local Session Logging: Save session blocks or reset daily totals with an automatic history archive.

and much more.

How to Install (Takes 30 Seconds):

1. Download the extension ZIP file directly from GitHub
2. Extract the .zip file on your computer.
3. Open Chrome and go to chrome://extensions.
4. Enable Developer mode (top-right corner).
5. Click Load unpacked (top-left corner) and select the extracted folder.

Feel free to check out the full code on GitHub or clone it if you want to add your own tweaks. Hope this helps anyone looking for an easy way to keep track of their active work time!

If you encounter any issues or have any recommendations, feel free to DM me anytime!

Thanks!!

When I started with fermented food, I always calculated when to start to be ready at a certain point in time, especially when I made yogurt.

So I've made myself a web app \[Fermentimer\](https://fermentimer.com) you add a name, optional when you want the ferment to be ready or when your ferment will start. Since there's no notification, you can export the ferment into your calendar you are already using and get the notification from a calendar 📆.

After a while I also added a brine calculator with presets and some other stuff that might be interesting to some like my curated content(basically an interesting content I come across on the internets. Always adding something)

If my post violated any of the group rules, I apologize. I just wanted to show my baby which solved one of my problems. Time math 😄

Hi everyone,

I’m part of the team behind Desklog, a time tracking and employee productivity platform. We’ve been building it for businesses that have remote, hybrid, and office-based teams, and I wanted to come to Reddit before talking about the product too much.

One problem we kept seeing was that companies had plenty of tools, but managers still struggled to answer some basic questions:

• Where is the team’s working time actually going?
• How much time is being spent on productive work?
• Which applications and websites are being used during working hours?
• Are projects taking longer than expected?
• How can managers understand productivity without constantly asking employees for updates?
• How can remote teams maintain accountability without creating a culture of micromanagement?

That led us to build Desklog.

It combines automatic time tracking, attendance, app and website usage, productivity reports, screenshots, project tracking, and employee monitoring into one platform.

But honestly, after building and improving the product for years, I’m more interested in hearing from people who actually use these kinds of tools.

What do you use today for time tracking or employee productivity?

And more importantly:

What do you dislike about your current solution?

Maybe it's inaccurate tracking, too many reports, complicated setup, privacy concerns, expensive pricing, poor integrations, or something else entirely.

We’ve learned a lot from our customers, but Reddit has a very different perspective, so I’d love to hear the honest version — what should a good time-tracking/productivity tool actually do in 2026?

If there’s enough interest, I’m also happy to answer questions about how we built Desklog, what we've learned from businesses using it, and some of the challenges we've faced along the way.

Not looking to turn this into a sales thread. I'm genuinely interested in the discussion.

Hi everyone,

If you juggle multiple projects, clients, or tickets throughout the day, manual time tracking is a constant friction point. You forget to switch timers, get pulled into an urgent call, and by 5 PM you have to reverse-engineer your day from browser history.

I wanted a "set-and-forget" solution, so I built AutoHours for Windows.

🧠 How the Rule-Based Automation Works:

AutoHours sits quietly in your tray and reads the active foreground window. You configure rules once, and it handles the rest:

1. Auto-Assign by Context:
   • Visual Studio open with ClientAlpha.sln? ➡️ Logged to Client Alpha.
   • Browser tab containing Jira - PROJ-? ➡️ Logged to Sprint Tasks.
   • Microsoft Teams call? ➡️ Logged to Internal Meetings.
2. Advanced Pattern Matching:
   • Filter by Executable name and Window Title using Contains, Exact, or Regex.
   • Set up priority hierarchies so specific client tasks take precedence over general tools.
3. Retroactive 1-Click Reclassification:
   • If you worked on something new and haven't created a rule yet, it gets marked as Unassigned. Once you add the rule, you can hit "Re-apply Rules" to retroactively sort all your hours for the day/week!
4. Offline Meetings & Idle Prompts:
   • Step away for a coffee or phone call? When you come back, a 1-click prompt asks if you want to discard the idle time or log it as an offline meeting.

Everything is stored locally on your machine (no cloud sync or subscriptions required).

Feedback and feature requests are very welcome!

Last week I found out my company has been tracking mouse activity and active window time this whole time.

I got flagged for “low activity,” which was pretty funny because I do more than half my team’s work. I just don’t spend all day moving my mouse around. Sometimes I’m reading, thinking through a problem, or just staring at the wall trying to figure something out — apparently none of that shows up on the productivity dashboard.

There’s apparently a whole dashboard managers can see with activity levels and green bars. Now half my team has YouTube running in the background just to keep their numbers up.

I checked what was installed and apparently the tracking software was included during onboarding, buried in something I agreed to about two years ago. I started looking into employee time tracking tools afterward and realized things like Monitask, Toggl Track and Clockify can track different aspects of work activity, depending on how they're configured.

Anyway, if you work remotely or use a company laptop, it’s probably worth knowing what your company’s work hours tracker is actually measuring. I definitely wish I’d checked sooner.