How to track time for a side project without it feeling like a job
· 6 min read
Do not start a timer. The moment a side project asks you to clock in, it borrows the worst part of a job and keeps none of the pay. Instead, let the time be noticed without your involvement, read it once a week rather than once a day, and ask only the questions that matter for something you do for love: is it getting any time at all, and is that time going where you think.
Why timers turn projects into jobs
A timer makes every session a decision. Start it, and you have declared that this counts. Forget it, and you have failed at the project before writing a line. Stop it to answer the door and you are now managing a tool instead of building the thing. Timers exist to bill, and a side project does not bill anyone.
The same goes for tags, projects and categories. A form that asks “which project?” before you can begin is fine when a client is paying for the answer. On a Tuesday evening with forty minutes and a half-formed idea, it is a door you have to open before the real door.
Whatever tracking you do has to be invisible during the session and visible only afterwards. timer-based-time-tracking-vs-automatic-which-one-you-will-actually-keep-up.html is the longer argument, but for side projects the short version is enough: if it takes effort, you will stop, and then you will stop the project.
What you actually want to know
Side projects do not need billable precision. They need three honest answers.
- Is it getting time at all? Most side projects die not from bad decisions but from weeks where the hours silently went to zero. Knowing the number is how you catch the third zero week before it becomes the tenth.
- Is it eating the wrong hours? A project that lives between eleven at night and one in the morning is a project that is costing you the next day. The total can look healthy while the timing is not.
- Is the time on the work or around it? Reading about the thing, watching videos about the thing, and chatting about the thing all feel like the thing. The build, the draft, the recording: those are the thing.
None of these needs a category. They need the hours and the app, which a Mac can notice on its own.
Let the Mac notice
Punchcard is a menu bar app that records which app is in front during the day, app names only, and at the closing time you set prints a paper receipt: one line per app with the time, a day total, a stamp. There is nothing to start, stop, tag or name. It asks for no macOS permissions and has no account.
For a side project, the useful part is that the project’s apps show up as their own lines without you doing anything. If the day job is in a browser and a mail client and the project is in a code editor, an audio app or a drawing tool, the evening’s receipt has the project on it by name. The weekend receipts, with the day job absent, are usually the cleanest view of the project you will get.
- Install Punchcard and set a closing time late enough to cover evening sessions. If you build after dinner, a closing time of ten means the receipt includes the session.
- Ignore it for a week.
- On Sunday, read the week roll. Find the project’s app lines and add them up. That is the week’s number.
Be honest about the limits. Punchcard has no projects and no tags, so if the side project and the day job happen in the same app (both in the same editor, both in the same browser), the receipt cannot separate them. It does not know what you were building. It will not tell you which hour of the day a line came from. If you need that separation, the choices are a per-project tracker with its timers and its forms, or a workaround: a separate macOS user account for the project gives you a separate Punchcard roll, because the data lives in that user’s own Application Support folder. That is more ceremony than most people want, and it is fair to say so.
Read it weekly, not daily
A daily number on a side project is a daily verdict, and verdicts are what you were trying to avoid. A week is a fairer unit. Some weeks have three evenings, some have none, and the project is fine either way as long as the month is not empty.
The week roll is the document for this. Look at the project’s lines, look at the days they fall on, and ask the three questions above. Then put the roll in a folder (the PNG export is built for that) and do not look at it again until next Sunday. After a couple of months the folder tells you something a timer never could: what the project actually costs you, in evenings, and whether it is worth it.
If the answer to “is it getting time at all” is no for a month, that is information too. Some projects should be dropped, and a clear number makes that decision kinder than a vague sense of guilt. tracking-a-sabbatical-a-job-search-or-a-quiet-month.html is about the same kind of gentle counting for other in-between periods.
When the project becomes a job
Sometimes the side project grows up. A client appears, an invoice needs sending, hours need to be justified to someone other than you. At that point the questions change from “is it getting time” to “how many hours for whom at what rate,” and the tools have to change with them.
Punchcard is not that tool. It has no per-client tracking, no billable rates, no invoicing and no manual timers, and it will not grow those. The right move is to keep the receipts for the “where did my day go” picture and add a per-project tracker for the billing, or to switch entirely if the project has fully become work. how-to-track-billable-hours-without-forgetting-to-start-the-clock.html is about that next stage.
Until then, keep it invisible. The project does not need to feel like a job to be taken seriously; it needs to keep getting evenings.
Questions
Can I see just the side project’s hours, separate from everything else?
Only as far as the project uses different apps from the rest of your day. Punchcard itemizes by app, so a distinct editor or tool shows as its own line; a shared browser does not split. There are no projects or tags to assign.
What if I work on the project on my phone or iPad?
That time is not on the receipt. Punchcard is a Mac app with no iPhone version, and it only sees what is in front on the Mac.
Is tracking a hobby at all a bad idea?
It can be, if the tracking becomes the hobby. The test is whether the number changes what you do. If a month of receipts shows the project starving and you give it an evening, the tracking earned its place. If you are checking totals every night, turn it off and just build.