I’m Bmax has a post about his journey to find the perfect way to track his time. Like almost everyone else, he started with a spreadsheet but if you’ve ever done that you know what a pain it is and how hard it is to keep it up. He tried a few other solutions before settling on Emacs and Org-mode.
The thing that makes tracking your time with Org-mode so easy is that you just put the point on a task and clock in. When you’re finished or clock into another task, Org records the start and end time so that the time spent on a task is easily available. It doesn’t end there, of course. Org can produce reports on the total time spent on various task with a single key sequence.
I’m Bmax seems happy with his Org solution. It’s just a matter of clocking in and out of the task Org entries he needs in any event. In my experience, the time tracking comes later. You start with recording tasks or some other item and then realize that you can easily track how much time you spend on them with a simple key sequence.
Lots of people use Org mode to track their time for billing purposes and even produce their bills from the Org data. The nice thing about using Org is that you can simply record the times or use it to produce reports or bills on the time you spent on various tasks.