End Your Timesheet Woes

Monday morning, 9:00 AM. You’ve smacked yourself for not filing your timesheet Friday afternoon before you left. You realize you did a terrible job last week of tracking what you did and you’re going to have to rack your brains, and you outbox, to figure out what you accomplished.

I’ve discovered that there’s no easy solution to this. But there’s one that eases the pain. Please note, you’ll need Microsoft Outlook and Windows for this!

TaskBlaze
TaskBlaze is a delightful gem of an applet from Brad Isaac. Isaac is a writer, speaker, and software programmer (GREAT combination there, Brad!) and his activity tracking software is very easy to work with.

Here’s how it works: You enter a description of your task and hit the “Start” button. The window (pictured, right) then shrinks down to become a “Stop” button. Get working on your task — when you’re finished, or when you have to pause, click the “Stop” button. Your task and its duration will automatically be logged in Microsoft Outlook!

As long as you’re relatively consistent about logging your activities in TaskBlaze, your Monday mornings will be relatively painless.

There are a couple of steps you’ll have to go through in order to install TaskBlaze. I’ve excerpted them from Brad’s site so you know what to expect. And by the way, be sure to check our guide to unzipping files so that you can extract TaskBlaze!

1. Download and install yourself a copy of Microsoft’s .NET Framework (free) if you don’t have it already.
2. Download and unzip a copy of Download Taskblaze_B8.zip (194.4K) to a handy place on your Windows computer.