Porter's World

Klok

Are you self employed? Do you find putting in the right amount of work hours hard? Do you find keeping track of those work hours hard? Never again shall you answer yes to any of the above! Infomercial tone aside, Klok is a wonderful program that will not only keep track of your hours, but help motivate you. I recently wrote an article on being your own boss, and how complicated that could be due to motivating yourself to put in a proper amount of hours; since the discovery of this program, my production has greatly increased, and my work shows as a result. Let’s take a look at what the program has to offer.

The greatest thing about Klok, is how simple it is to use. It doesn’t have a ton of added features, it doesn’t require you to save, it just does what it’s supposed to do, keep track of your work hours. To get started, you simply create a new project. All of your projects will show up on the left side of the screen in a color coded, organized list. This portion of the interface can be collapsed if you so choose, but I personally prefer to keep it open. You can double click on a project to rename it, change it’s color, and add sub projects. As far as project organization goes, that’s up to you. I personally prefer to create a main project with my name, then have a sub project for each one of my projects, such as games, website work, and so on. Within games, I have another sub project for each individual game, and within each game project, sub projects for each task pertaining to that game. In the end, it doesn’t really matter how you set things up, the functionality will be the same, it’s just a matter of preference. Once you’ve created your projects and sub projects, you’re ready to go.

Now for actually using Klok to record your hours. To start recording your work, simply click on the exact project you’re working on, such as Porter/Games/Current Game/Level Design, right click, then press work on. Klok will then start recording your work hours, it’s as simple as that. If you want to work on multiple tasks at once, simply activate them, Klok will even change it’s visual representation of your hours to show that multiple tasks were going on during that given time . To stop working, simply press the stop button, located at the top of the program. Pressing stop does seem to stop recording all your current active projects, so if you stop only one task, be sure to resume the others immediately after. You can also manually edit the hours worked on projects; you can move them around to different times, increase or decrease hours worked, and so on. Use this feature if you wish to make up for hours worked when you forgot to turn on the program, something you’ll find rather common before you make using Klok a regular habit. If you need to delete hours, simply drag and drop them into the trash can found on the bottom left side of the interface.

One of the best features of Klok, is it’s ability to display data back to the user. If you’ve organized your projects and sub projects correctly, you can get some very useful information out of Klok, in no other form than the beloved pie chart. To see these charts, simply click on Reports. You’ll instantly see a pie chart showing the data of all your top level projects. Clicking on a project within the pie chart will then update the chart showing the data for that specific project. If you’ve set up your project correctly, you can look at how many hours you’ve put into an individual project, and how much time you’ve spent on each task within that project.

Klok also has a number of added features, luckily for those who don’t want them, they’re not at all in the way. If you’re in a more work place environment, perhaps your boss requires you to log your hours worked, and what you worked on. When this is the case, bosses will generally require you to use a program such as Microsoft Excel. The developers have kept this in mind, and added a feature to instantly export your Klok data to an Excel project file. Your hours can be exported as either a weekly time sheet, or a monthly time sheet, very handy. If you’re into archiving, you can do so by simply dragging and dropping a project into the archive box at the bottom left of the program; that’s a nice plus for keeping track of previous work. The developers are also working on version 2.0 of the program, and from what I’ve read, they’re also adding in support for third party programs. For now, I suggest using the 1.5 beta, it’s far superior to the 1.0 version is stable from what I can tell. If you have any suggestions for the program, check out the developer’s forums and leave a comment.

All in all, Klok is an amazing program. It’s simple to use, the interface is clean, and it gets the job done. If you are like I was, and had issues putting in the right amount of hours, you’ll definitely find that using Klok fixes this. I’ve always wondered exactly how much money I’ve been making per hour as a flash game developer, with Klok, I’ll actually be able to figure that out accurately, and with ease. If you haven’t installed it yet, I definitely suggest doing so, it’s one of the best free programs I’ve ever come across, and I’m loving it.