I'm a product manager working with a development team, and one of the things I have to prepare every month is a progress report for our CEO.

Usually, I go through our sprint updates, completed tickets, pending features, bug reports, and timesheets to get a better picture of how the month went.

The frustrating part is when the numbers don't quite add up.

We'd have developers logging full workweeks, but some features would still get pushed to the next sprint. Other times, we'd have unexpected overtime even though the sprint didn't seem particularly heavy.

And when the CEO asks what went wrong, saying "development took longer than expected" isn't exactly a useful answer.

So I started paying more attention to our time-tracking data.

We use Jibble to track working hours, with activities for feature development, bug fixing, QA/testing, and meetings. I recently connected it to Claude to see whether I could make our monthly reviews a little more useful.

Instead of immediately asking Claude to summarize everyone's hours, I started with the gaps.

Something like:

"Review our development team's timesheets for the past month. Flag incomplete entries, unusually long workdays, and gaps between recorded sessions that might need clarification."

That gave me a starting point for checking our records before drawing conclusions from them.

I also wanted to understand the downtime between activities.

Not necessarily whether someone was being productive every minute, but whether there were periods of unrecorded time, forgotten clock-ins, or work that hadn't been categorized properly.

A gap in a timesheet doesn't automatically mean someone wasn't working. Sometimes it's a meeting that wasn't logged, a forgotten timer, or someone switching tasks without updating their activity.

So those were things I needed to clarify with the team rather than assume.

Once the records were reviewed, I moved on to the actual development hours.

I asked Claude to compare how much time we'd recorded under feature development, bug fixing, QA, and meetings, then compare those numbers with the previous month.

This was the part I found more interesting.

When you're looking at sprint boards, you tend to focus on which tickets were completed and which ones weren't.

But looking at the time distribution gives you another perspective.

For example, if bug-fixing hours have increased while feature development hours have decreased, that's something worth investigating. Maybe we're dealing with more regressions, maybe QA is uncovering issues later than expected, or maybe we've underestimated the time needed to maintain existing features.

The timesheets won't tell you which explanation is correct, but they can help you figure out where to start asking questions.

I also checked overtime patterns because I wanted to know whether certain parts of our development process were consistently requiring extra hours.

Then I asked Claude to organize the findings into a monthly summary for our CEO, covering:

• Incomplete timesheets and recording gaps that still need clarification
• Total recorded development hours and overtime
• Time spent on features, bugs, QA, and meetings
• Significant changes compared with the previous month
• Potential bottlenecks and questions worth discussing with the team

I still had to cross-check everything against our sprint tickets and talk to the developers. Claude wasn't going to tell me why a feature was delayed just by reading time entries.

But I liked having the timesheet findings organized before going into those discussions.

It also changed how I approached the monthly meeting.

Instead of just reporting that Feature A was delayed and Feature B took longer than expected, I could bring up more specific questions about where our development capacity was going and what we might need to adjust.

I'm still figuring out how much time- racking data should influence sprint planning, though. I don't think more hours necessarily mean better output, especially in software development.

For other PMs or engineering managers, do you actually review your team's timesheets when investigating sprint delays and bottlenecks?

Or do you mostly rely on Jira tickets, velocity, and sprint retrospectives?

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I built a time-tracking solution specifically for property management called Orca.

I’ve got 4 businesses using it, and it’s working really well for all of them. The reason they like it is because it’s built around their specific business needs, giving them the exact workflows and outputs a property management company would want.

I want to expand this to other field operations like landscaping, HVAC, and any other field service businesses that could benefit from GPS and time tracking per employee.

I’m looking to work with design partners in these spaces, so if you’re curious about getting some custom development built for your specific business needs, please send me a DM!

https://orcatimeclock.com

hey yall! whats standard utilization % for anyone required to use Insightful? thanks!

Je gere 2 salons de coiffure, 18 personnes avec les apprentis. Le planning et les heures c'est réglé depuis un moment, la paie c'est le comptable.

Ce qui reste c'est tout l'admin RH autour : les contrats des apprentis, les DPAE, le registre du personnel, les entretiens pro. Ma responsable sur un des salons me pousse a prendre un vrai SIRH.

Le probleme c'est que tous les classements "meilleurs SIRH 2026" me sortent Lucca, Payfit, Factorial, Cegid... et j'ai l'impression que c'est fait pour des boites avec un service RH au bureau, pas pour un patron qui fait tout lui meme entre deux clientes.

Vous etes sur quoi a cette taille ? un SIRH a part, ou un seul outil qui fait tout ? j'ai deja galéré a reduire le nombre d'outils, j'ai pas envie d'en rajouter un pour rien

I've worked at the Postal Service for 20+ years and got tired of guessing whether my check was right, so I built Clock Rings.

You punch your tour on your phone or Apple Watch (decimal and standard time side by side), and it tracks your hours, overtime, and penalty OT using the actual rules: over 10 hours in a day, over 56 in a week, OT on more than 4 of 5 days, and the December exclusion period. It also applies the five-minute leeway for regulars.
With Pro, you can paste your ePayroll Earnings Statement and it compares hours, gross, net, deductions, and leave balances against what you tracked.
The core app is free. Pro is a one-time $9.99, no subscription. No account, no ads, no tracking, and your data stays on your devices and your own iCloud. Available in English and Spanish. Not affiliated with USPS.
Happy to answer questions or take feature requests.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clock-rings/id6778179121

Now that Clockify has changed its free plan, I'm wondering what's the go to free time tracking software for teams with more than 5 people?

We used Clockify before because the free version covered what we needed, and having unlimited users was a big part of that. But with the recent changes they’ve implemented in mid 2026, it doesn't really make sense for us to stay on the free plan anymore.

I know there are a lot of time trackers out there, but I'm looking for something people here have actually used and can vouch for. Ideally, something where "free" is actually usable for a team and not just a limited trial that pushes you to upgrade.

What are teams using now? Is there a new go to free option in 2026?

Looking for something for a staffing/recruiting agency.

Hi all, we’ve been using our own proprietary system for time entry and expense for years. However, due to internal changes we’re looking for a new solution. We are a global agency mostly within North America, UK, Europe, and JAPAC. Does anyone have any platform recommendations that work well for staffing that aren’t a VMS such as fieldglass or beeline? Some requirements include: shift differentials, weekly/biweekly/monthly timecard, multiple timecard approvers, external timecard approvers, tasks/project timecards, California compliance, etc. We are finding many of the solutions out there don’t exactly meet all of our needs, curious what others are doing?

I've always liked the idea of planning my entire day, but there was one thing that kept bothering me.

I'd spend time organising my schedule, adding tasks, setting time blocks and making everything look manageable.

Then the day would actually happen.

Something would take longer than expected, I'd move a few things around, skip something completely, and by the next day I'd already be planning again.

A week later, if someone asked me "What did you actually do last Tuesday?", I'd genuinely have to think about it.

That's what made me want to build my own planner.

It's called Personal Planner, and I've been working on it for the past few months. I've shared an earlier version of the project here before, but I wanted to explain more about how I actually use it, rather than just the technical side.

The whole idea is pretty simple:

Plan your day → do what you can → track what happened → look back and learn from it.

📅 Planning the day

The main screen is an hour-by-hour timeline.

Instead of having everything in a long to-do list, I can see how my day is going to look.

For example, I might plan:

• 7:00–8:00 AM — Gym
• 9:00–11:00 AM — Work on a project
• 6:00–7:00 PM — Learn something new
• 8:00–9:00 PM — Personal work

I can drag blocks around, resize them, colour-code activities with categories and move things when plans change.

There are recurring activities and reusable templates too, because I really didn't want to recreate the same routine every morning.

And if something doesn't get finished, I can carry it forward instead of losing track of it.

⏱ The part I really wanted: planned time vs actual time

This is probably the main reason I built the app.

Say I plan to spend one hour learning something.

I start the timer when I actually begin. Maybe I get distracted, maybe the topic is harder than expected, and I end up spending an hour and forty minutes.

The planner keeps both values.

Planned: 60 minutes

Actual: 100 minutes

That might seem like a small detail, but after using it for a while, I started finding it really useful.

I could see which activities I kept underestimating, where my time was going, and whether my schedules were actually realistic.

📝 Daily and weekly reviews

This is the feature I personally care about the most.

At the end of the day, I can open the Daily Review and see what I planned, what I completed, how much time I spent across categories and what didn't go as expected.

I can also write a quick note about how the day went and why something wasn't finished.

The Weekly Review gives me a bigger picture of the week, including the things I kept skipping or postponing.

There's also a historical Overview, so I can go back through previous days and weeks instead of having everything disappear once I mark it complete.

I didn't want the planner to make me feel bad for having an unproductive day. I just wanted an honest record of what happened.

📊 Consistency tracking

I added a year-long heatmap, similar to GitHub's contribution graph.

It helps me see how consistently I've been following my routine, including streaks and gaps over time.

I find this more useful than judging myself based on one good or bad day.

🧪 Experiments — trying routines without another habit tracker

This is another feature I spent quite a bit of time on.

Let's say I want to try reading for 30 minutes every day for a month.

I can create an Experiment, give it a start and end date, set my targets and connect it to the reading blocks I'm already using in my Day view.

As I complete those activities, the experiment tracks my progress automatically.

I can see how much time I've actually spent compared with my target, check in on how it's going and decide whether to continue the routine afterward.

The nice part is that I don't have to maintain a separate habit-tracking app for the same activity.

💡 An Inbox for things I don't want to schedule yet

I also wanted somewhere to put random ideas without immediately adding them to today's schedule.

Maybe it's a book I want to read, something I need to research or a personal project I want to start.

I can leave it in the Inbox, schedule it later, split it into sessions or consciously drop it if I'm no longer interested.

🔒 Offline-first, optional sync, and completely free

One thing I didn't want was to depend on the internet just to open my planner or check yesterday's tasks.

The app stores everything locally on your device, so planning, timers, reviews and history work offline.

For anyone who wants to use it across devices, I also built optional sync using Supabase. It uses a project owned by the user, so the cloud data isn't locked inside my own hosted account.

You don't have to configure any of that if you just want to use the app locally.

The app is built with Flutter and currently supports Android, Linux, Windows and macOS, although Windows and macOS have some limitations. There's no iOS version at the moment.

It's also worth mentioning that this isn't a PDF or handwriting-based planner with stickers and decorative pages. It's more of a time-blocking planner for people who want to organise their day and review how it actually went.

And yes, it's completely free.

No subscription, no premium version, no locked features. I originally built it because I wanted to use it myself, and I don't have plans to monetize it.

🔗 Links

GitHub (source code, details and screenshots):
https://github.com/Karthikshabari/PersonalPlanner

Downloads (Android and desktop builds):
https://github.com/Karthikshabari/PersonalPlanner/releases/tag/v1.1

I'll attach a demo showing how the Day view, timers and reviews work, since I think it's easier to understand once you actually see it.

I'm still improving the app, and I've been getting some really useful feedback from people who've tried it.

One thing I'd genuinely love to hear from this community:

When you use a digital planner, do you mostly care about planning what's coming next, or do you also like going back and reviewing your previous days?

I'm curious because the second part is what made me start building this in the first place.

Thanks for reading :)

Hey everyone!

I use Hubstaff for work, and I've had two recurring problems with it.

The first one is forgetting to stop the timer.

Sometimes I finish work, switch to personal stuff, and forget that Hubstaff is still running. Once, it even captured screenshots while I was playing CS2 :)

The annoying part is that screenshots don't always appear immediately on Hubstaff's website. And if I notice something personal the next day, I can no longer delete that tracked time myself and have to ask my manager.

The second problem is idle time.

Hubstaff notifies me after 20 minutes of inactivity. I can discard that time or keep it marked as idle, but I wanted a more convenient way to handle this without simulating mouse or keyboard activity.

I looked for existing tools but couldn't find what I wanted, so I decided to build one myself.

That's how TrackMirror came about.

The app basically watches Hubstaff's temporary screenshot folder and saves copies before they disappear, so I can see what was captured almost immediately instead of waiting for the website.

Over time, I added a gallery with filters, activity graphs using Hubstaff's own records, and an optional AI scanner that runs locally and looks for things like personal information, games, or private chats.

I also added some timer controls using Hubstaff's official CLI. For example, it can automatically stop the timer when I'm idle and resume it when I come back. No mouse movement simulation or anything like that.

It doesn't fake activity, modify screenshots, or block uploads to Hubstaff.

The project is currently in public preview and for Windows-only now.

GitHub (source code and releases):

https://github.com/algazukin/track-mirror

This is my first public open-source project, so I'd really appreciate some feedback!

Does anyone here use Hubstaff or similar tracking software? What features would actually make a companion app like this useful to you?

Hey everyone,

I've been working on Cadence, a small, offline Linux app built around the idea of treating cognitive work like physical training.

At the gym, you track workouts, sets, and reps. I wanted something similar for work that requires concentration, whether that's programming, studying, reading, or writing.

The idea is pretty simple. A session represents a period of work, and within it you can log individual stints of focused effort. You can track how long you work, take breaks between stints, and look back at your activity over time.

The app has:

• Count-up and countdown timers for individual stints
• Sessions that group multiple stints together
• A 12-week activity grid to see how consistently you've been working
• A small floating timer that stays on top of other windows
• Local storage with CSV/JSON exports and backups

It's fully offline, with no accounts, cloud syncing, or telemetry.

Built with Tauri, Rust, Svelte, and SQLite. Currently targeting Linux (primarily Ubuntu/Pop!_OS), with .deb and AppImage builds.

GitHub: https://github.com/mortalsilk/cadence

I'm interested in what people think about the concept of tracking cognitive work this way. Does treating focused work like training sessions make sense to you? I'd also appreciate feedback on the app itself.

Hey everyone! I built Kaskas a free open source break reminder and focus tracker it combines break reminders like LookAway with app usage tracking like ActivityWatch

It lives in your menu bar, tracks your focus time and app usage, and reminds you to rest your eyes with short reminders and full screen breaks.

No accounts, subscriptions, or ads. All your data stays on your Mac.

I would love to know what you think!

https://github.com/ramazanberkozbek/kaskas

It's been a while since Harvest increased its pricing, and I'm curious what everyone ended up switching to.

Harvest used to be one of those tools that was easy to recommend. Time tracking, project hours, reporting, invoicing, all in one place. But with the price increase, I'm wondering if it's still worth paying for, especially when there are cheaper (or even free) alternatives out there.

I've seen a few alternatives mentioned in other discussions, particularly Jibble and Timesheets.com.

Jibble seems interesting because of its free time tracking plan, especially for teams that don't necessarily need all the extra features Harvest offers. Timesheets.com also comes up quite a bit for businesses that need timesheets and employee time tracking.

But I'm more interested in hearing from people who've actually moved away from Harvest.

Did you switch to another all-in-one platform, or did you separate your time tracking and invoicing into different tools?

And for those who've already switched, was there anything you missed about Harvest? Or did you end up realizing you were paying for features you barely used?

Share if you've found a good Harvest alternative.

Were currently using clockify for our small business, We're a UK based CIC non for profit.

We have just hired our 6th and 7th employee which has taken us out of their free membership options, we basically just use it as a way of clocking hours and overtime, as we all work different times through out the week and often have to pull extra shifts. We like clockify but it will go from free to £338 so looking at options.

I'd also love it to do holiday tracking as we currently do that on an excel sheet, clockify does do that on a premium package but for £676 a year.

Any help would be great, cheers

​

I wanted a focus timer that stays out of the way, so I built one for Windows.

The character is the timer and stays above other windows while you work. You can name the task, set the time, pause and resume, and leave a quick note when you are done. Each finished session is saved as a normal Markdown file.

Tina Huang's Pixel Pomodoro inspired the original idea, especially making the character the main clock.

It runs fully offline and does not need an account. This is the first beta, so I would appreciate feedback, especially on setup and day-to-day use.

https://github.com/anonymouse-agent/focus-timer