Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Using a task's dates for basic time management

Keeping track of time spent on a task is useful for reporting later. This week’s tip, shared by danielalbu, suggests giving yourself tasks to note the time you start on them, then marking the time afterward when completing them.

As a freelancer, sometimes you want to know how much time you spent on a certain task.

While relying on third-party time management tools can be useful for complex time management, most of the time you just want to start working on one task and see how much time has passed once you’ve completed it.

In order to do this, I assign a task to myself once I start working on it. This will change the “updated” field (which is listed in the “Info” popup) to the current time.

When you complete the task, you can copy the “Updated” value and paste it in the “Start Time” field. Then, you can mark it as “Complete” in RTM.

This way when you review your completed tasks, you’ll be able to see the exact start time (“Start” field) and end time (“Completed” field) of each completed task!

Thanks for sharing this tip, danielalbu! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.