I’ve used a few different project management programs, my current favorite is Basecamp. However, Basecamp wants to treat everything as a project and gets in your way if you want to track time spent on tasks that are not bound to a specific project. 
Today, for example, I need to track some time spent on a one-off task for a client. It’s pretty close-ended, I’ll do the work, send the hours spent to accounting and I’m done. Creating a Basecamp project for this would be overkill.
As a software nerd, the thought of just using a stop watch seems sacrilegious so I opted to search for an appropriate piece of software that would allow me to time unbounded tasks.
Enter SlimTimer. SlimTimer is a web application which allows you to quickly create time bounded tasks. Sign-up is quick and (as near as I can tell) free.
Once you create an account, you can begin creating tasks in a tiny (think Slim) pop-up window. When tasks are activated, a timer starts. Close the window, the timer stops. So far this seems to do exactly what I need.
If that was all the application could do then all I did was find a web 2.0 stop watch. The really cool thing is the reporting. SlimTimer allows you to generate invoices, timesheets or more generic reports showing the time spent on a series of tasks.
You can then take these reports, and print them or export them to CSV, handy if you need to send this to someone else.
If you need a quick way to time tasks, give SlimTimer a test drive.
[tags]productivity,project management,web2.0[/tags]
