For many of us, there is that time at the end of the week spent trying to approximate where our time went in the midst of dizzyingly complex development work. More often than not, this task can be infuriating: it’s easy to forget what you were doing during the first half of Monday–was I fleshing out the UML? Or was I doing some debugging on the main module? Usually, we end up fudging our results, or making rough estimates.

This is okay most of the time. But, what if you find yourself really getting behind without really knowing why? This is when time management tools really come in handy. There are numerous good choices out there that will allow you to enter in data and metadata about the time you’ve spent on your projects–and, even keeping track of multiple projects.

But, one thing that most of these services do not provide is an automatic way for you to enter in the times that you worked on a project. At the end of the day, the systems still depend on your faulty memory of the week. 88 Miles, a new time tracking service that just launched this month, aims to provide an easier way to track your time without all the mental gymnastics.

The idea behind 88 Miles is that a little work now will save a lot of work later. Ironically, the application works like the time trackers of old: punch in when you start work on a project, and punch out when you end work on it. 88 Miles keeps track of the time, duration, and date of your work. At the end of the week, you’ll have yourself a neat little timesheet that represents the breakdown of your efforts.

Of course, the accuracy of such a report hinges on your discipline in using 88 Miles. Personally, my projects aren’t logistically complex enough to use 88 Miles, but I know a number of people who would benefit from this tool, and wouldn’t mind the small overhead of clicking a button once in a while.

Currently, the features of 88 Miles, which is built with Ruby on Rails, are quite simple. The founder, and yet another single-man team, Myles Eftos, is a freelance web developer in Perth, Wester Austrialia working under the moniker of MadPilot Productions. He’s been in the industry for about the last 5 years, sub-contracting to other web design firms around Perth.

Myles is currently working on a webservice API to promote mashups and extensions to 88 Miles. These will also form the basis of desktop and possibly PDA and phone interfaces. In addition, a corporate version is also in the pipeline which would allow managers to create and manage a group of users.

If all goes well, 88 Miles is set to target freelance and small web firms. But it doesn’t stop there, 88 Miles could possibly extend its reach into a plethora of other industries, including graphic designers, accountants, and engineers.

I would say that if 88 Miles adds a desktop app to quickly access your projects, and a few more organizational bells and whistles, I’ll be hooked.

This entry was posted by James Yu on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 8:29 am and is filed under 88 Miles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.