Wheredidthedaygo Syndrome is rampant throughout the business world these days. It’s warning signs include missing lunch, being late for meetings, working on weekends and a general feeling of exhaustion. Now there’s a new tool to help you toward a cure.Entrepreneurs are known to be especially susceptible to this dreaded disease. Studies have found that it stems from a complicated mix of business obligations, social obligations, parenthood, the drive for success and is further complicated by email, blackberry’s, cell phones, and the need to wear many more hats than anytime in the past.

The cure? Well productivity experts will tell you it’s a three step process:

1. Find out and track where you’re spending your time,
2. Put priorities on everything you do, and
3. Stop doing that stuff you like to do at the bottom of the list. (That’s the hard part for me.)

Simple, eh? Well maybe not but at least there’s a great new tool out there that I’ve recently discovered that actually makes it possible to get a handle on step one. And I have to start out by telling you I’ve been looking for this tool for years now. I’ve looked at dozens of things that are out there. Freeware, shareware, priced ware, desktop, web based, you name it. The problem? Too complex to use. Too cumbersome to use. Too expensive to use.

That is, until I discovered Toggl. A great new tool that has just come out in beta. Toggl is a new .NET desktop widget combined with a web-based reporting system. The personal version is free and of course there are options to upgrade to a priced version (which to me, seems a little pricey for a personal user but fine for a business). But the good news is the free one let’s me at least do everything I’m looking to do.

The desktop widget stays nicely out of the way running in your Systray. To start/stop the timer or change tasks, you just double click the Toggl icon and a popup allows you to perform the operation in one click so it’s really easy to change between tasks. And if you forget to turn Toggl off while you go down to the water cooler, it senses you’ve been gone and asks you if you’d like to remove that time. Your time is organized into Projects or Clients and then tasks within those headings. Adding a new task is really easy.

   

To generate reports, there’s a link to the Toggl web site where you can generate various reports by day, week, month, etc. With the upgraded premium version, you can also generate billing reports with your own logo and more formatting.

So I’ve begun Step 1 to begin figuring out where my days are going. I’ll report back in a couple of weeks.

  

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