Here’s how the Quick Entry box makes clever assumptions about your entries so you can save yourself typing and hair-pulling:

• Enter “15”, and it logs 15 minutes.
• Enter “1”, and it logs 1 hour.
• Enter “1 day”, and it logs 8 hours.

You can override the Quick Entry assumptions by using “h” and “m” to indicate hours and minutes.

Behold! A few more Quick Entry tabulation examples.

*Note: these tabulations are for a project with a default billing increment of 15 minutes. Freckle will round up those annoying 3-minute tasks for you!

If you’ve set your billing increment to “none,” or some other value, your rounding may vary. Adjust your billing increment on the Settings & Tools tab of your Freckle dashboard.

Play around with the Quick Entry box, and it’ll quickly become your time tracking & billing BFF.

Check out this list of great updates!
* Live search on nearly every page
* The Timer loads faster! Like lightning!
* We support Tempo data importing
* Unselect / select all team members on reports – only available if you have more than one user. No more extraneous clicking!

* Now includes an hours field in a CSV export
* Project merge option is only visible to account owners
* The mobile web version of Freckle for the iPhone is improved, and looks better on iPhone 4 screens
* The People page has been reformatted to show info about team members who are marked as freelancers

Along with all these, we have made some other minor tweaks & optimizations that make Freckle just a little bit more awesome. Please give them a try, and let us know what you think!

Hover of any of the circles to see details, and click them to hop to a detailed report of your work on that day.

It’s like a little Seinfeld chain, but better! (And certainly more colorful!)

We’ve more little features and helpers lined up and will write about them here as we release them!

Carson’s definition takes a jab at the stereotype that New Yorkers are impatient and perpetually in a hurry. But what is the real definition of a “New York minute”?

What is a New York Minute, after all?

The general consensus among the internet folk (from whom only the most reliable idiom-related knowledge is garnered) is that the phrase “New York minute” references the fast pace of life in New York City. Life on Manhattan Island is seen as subjectively faster than the speed in the rest of the world — so a minute in New York must go by much faster than a minute anywhere else.

Thus, “a New York minute” became a slang phrase indicating a thing that happens very quickly.

Whence “A New York Minute”?

The complete story of its origin — and the clever lad or lass who first uttered it — is lost in some undocumented conversation from several decades ago.

However, several websites claim the idiom originated in Texas around the 1960s, a shortened version of the phrase “A New Yorker does in an instant what it would take a Texan a whole minute to do.”

Of course, this phrase could go both ways — perhaps it’s not New Yorkers who’re fast, but Texans who’re slow.

There is, however, an earlier antecedent! The phrase appeared in print in 1954 referencing not a length of time, but an eensy-weensy little French poodle. The diminutive doggy was said to be “no bigger than a New York minute.”

That example, too, comes from a Texas source. Where, as everyone knows, they like things bigger. (Minutes, apparently, included!)

Does anyone else sense a little Texas-New York rivalry in this particular bit of horological slang?

For further idiom reference fun, see…

• “New York Minute” by Don Henley (performed by The Eagles), a song about appreciating what you have in the present moment, since life can change so quickly (“in a New York minute, everything can change”)
• American Airlines commercial starring James Gandolfini, about the hectic pace of New York life (and featuring the Johnny Carson joke mentioned above)
• “New York Minute” by French Montana, sampling the Don Henley song above, and also suggesting the speed at which life can change
• New York Minute, a teen comedy about a life-changing 24-hour period in the lives of twin sisters

You may have had some trouble accessing Freckle from Europe the past 24 hours. We’re very sorry!

It looks like a major backbone internet provider, Cogent, is experiencing major outage issues.

Freckle the application is up and running just fine; our hosting company is running just fine; but the connections between you, and the hosting company, may be in tatters, if your ISP uses Cogent somewhere up the stream.

Unfortunately, Cogent’s connectivity issues are the equivalent of the Icelandic volcano: they ground a lot of people, and there’s not a lot that can be done about it. Changing our hosting provider would not even make a difference.

Our hosting provider is working with Cogent, and here is their status blog on the issue. Unfortunately (again), Cogent themselves are remaining silent, so we don’t know anything more at this point than you do.

This totally sucks. Thank you so much for your patience and classiness.

We know it’s not really a solution, per se, but if you’re scratching your time down on paper until Freckle is back up, you might enjoy using our PDF/ paper time tracker that we made for people who love printable planners. You can still download it (because our blog is not affected by the outage due to a nice coincidence).

Download PDF (260k)

Thank you so much for bearing with us!

We’ll post updates as soon as we learn anything.

Oooh. What can I do with it?

You can now create invoices for any project.

You can specify a flat rate total (per invoice) or a single hourly rate (per invoice).

You can add any tax percentage you need, and specify any currency.

You can opt to show no hours, just a total, or even attach a full report on subsequent pages.

Choose your own invoice numbering and reference information.

How do I create an invoice?

We’ve made it drop-dead simple:

Just go into any of your projects with billable hours, and click Create new invoice.

As you can see, don’t have to go dig up your last invoice and figure out when you invoiced, just to make a new one. Freckle will automatically create an invoice for you out of any hours that you haven’t yet invoiced.

You can specify a date range, of course, if that’s the way you like to roll!

Then enter your client’s contact info, your contact info, including any tax IDs or whatnot that you need to include, and customize the other settings such as price/hourly rate, tax percentage, currency, and more.

(That’s just one more way we’ve shown our commitment to eliminating the demon of up-front configuration.)

I have hours invoiced before now. What do I do?

Been invoicing your Freckle time by some other means? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!

Just go into the project in question and click the button to Mark hours invoiced outside of Freckle. Provide the end-date of your last invoice (up to and including hours logged for that day), and we’ll mark ‘em as invoiced already so you can start with a fresh slate.

Don’t stress if you accidentally enter the wrong date. You can always undo it later.

How do I get my shiny new invoice to my clients?

Right now, you have three options:

1. Send them a special, private link by email, IM, or any other medium you can think of.

2. “Print” it as a PDF and email it to ‘em as an attachment.

3. Or print it on paper, and send it along by snail mail.

These invoices look great on-screen and on paper!

Freckle Invoicing is beta.

Our brand new invoicing system isn’t done yet. We’ve tested the daylights out of it, and everything sure works on our end, but it’s still possible that you might find minor issues here and there.

If you do, let us know! Click the pink Feedback button on the left side of every Freckle page.

And we know you’re going to want it to do even more awesome stuff.

Let us know about that, too!

What do you think?

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
— John Gall

Lifehacker!

Lifehacker named us one of their Top 10 Underhyped Web Apps.

To wit:

… Freckle doesn’t require you to learn a new set of rules or input methods to track how you spend your time working for clients. If you type “Writing copy for Benderson Corp. 1h45m,” it assigns a 1-hour-and-45-minute billing for Benderson. Want to make something non-billable, but still tracked? Add an asterisk after it. Freckle offers visually appealing reports about how you’re spending time for clients, but also how you’re spending your own time, giving you the chance to assess how you’re spending your time. A plan with one account and one project is free, and any of Freckle’s other plans can be tried for 30 days free, so if you don’t find yourself addicted to its charts and graphs, you can return to your spreadsheet.

And don’t forget: you can write 1h45m, but you can also write 1.75 or 105 and Freckle will figure it out for you.

Futurezone–In German!

As you may know, Thomas and I (Amy!) live in Vienna, Austria, and so do our totally indispensable partners at abloom. ORF is the Osterreichischer Rundfunk–the (publicly-funded) Austrian Broadcasting Agency, essentially.

They did a piece on Freckle, and another time service based in Austria. It’s in German originally but this translation is pretty decent!

Dan Taylor’s Video Interview – 8 mos Ago

A while back, we did a video interview for Dan Taylor, a social media reporter who also lives in Vienna. Our interviewer was his partner Magda Pressel. And Dan clearly had a blast putting the footage together. (Just play the first few seconds, even, to see what I mean!)

freckle: time tracking rethought from Dan Taylor on Vimeo.

It’s particularly fun to look back and see where things were when we were just getting started!

Download PDF (260k)

This is just version 1, and we have some other pocketable ideas.

But wait, there’s more! (coming soon)

You want more printable freebies (and maybe the occasional unmissable deal on our wonderful web apps)?

You can subscribe to our RSS feed or, if you’re not into that sorta thing, sign up for our loooow-traffic email notifications list, and I promise you won’t. miss. a thing.

(And of course we have a digital mobile version in the works, too, but y’know, that takes a lot longer in Illustrator.)

You’re so quiet. Whatcha thinkin’?

This is not a one-off for us. We’d like to evolve & improve the state of printable time tracking tools (damn, that’s a lot of t’s!).

So please, don’t leave that poor little comment box all by its lonesome self.

That time of year when the year’s almost run out, the time of year to look back on the past 12 months and beat ourselves up for not following through with the starry-eyed resolutions we made to lose weight, earn more money, and be less of a slacker, this time last year!

Orrrrrr…. not!

I personally have had it up to here (throat-slicing motion) with unnecessary and unhelpful New Year’s resolutions.

But at the same time, I can’t help but be seduced by the mystical quality of the year’s end. The year really does seem new somehow, after all the smoke from the fireworks (and the hangover) clears. Things seem… fresh.

And with that freshness comes a brand new income tax folder, baby!

Our New Years’ alignment

Building and launching Freckle has been big part of our ramp-up plan for this new year, 2009. Our goal is to be self-supporting with products and online services by 2010.

At the same time, we know that we won’t be happy just being in business for sake of paying the mortgage (such as it were). We want to help people; we want to add a little joy back to working (ours and yours); we want to make things that people love.

We all enjoy consulting, but we’ve all longed to do our own thang, too. And now we’re doing it. Boy, does that feel great.

How about you?

2008—a crazy year for so many countries on this little globe.

Has it inspired you to make changes? Take stock? Dream big? Readjust? Right-size? Face down a challenge? Do better? Do more good?

Tell me about it.