Yast – Time Tracking Software for Freelancers
There seem to be three major avenues of Web apps for the freelancer or small business: time tracking / task management, invoicing, and collaboration tools. It seems like every other app that we see here at sCommerce is one of those three things or a combination thereof.
Yast.com is no different, it’s a time tracking app. What sets it apart is its total simplicity. It’s a time tracking app and that’s it. No bells, no whistles, no extra widgets you probably won’t use.
For many of us, we don’t need to enter every little task we plan to do and track every piece of it. Freelancers are usually paid for performance, not for task management and time spent working. All we need is a way to track our time to be sure we’re being efficient and staying within our own parameters for the job.
For instance, if you’re a developer and you are working on a project that you bid by assuming it would take a total of 20 hours, 5 hours of which would be spent re-tooling their existing jQuery to match a new search tool’s needs, you’ll want to see if you get that done within that five hours. Or if you’re billing by the hour for a quick-fix job, you’d want to be sure you were within the budget given.
Yast is capable of tracking multiple projects, so you can break down your project into tasks or have multiple projects listed at one time. This way you can easily switch between projects and keep track of time spent on each one, individually.
In the end, of course, Yast is basically a stopwatch timer. You pick a task, start the timer, and go to work. When you’re done, you stop the timer. If you stop for a break or lunch or for the day, you stop the timer and come back to it again later.
It’s a very simple tool, easy to understand and use, and it’s free. A lot of freelancers will likely find it useful. Most of us don’t really need a complicated time/project/client/task tracking and management tool, we just need to keep track of our time.
