Time tracking for freelancers

Why freelancers struggle with time tracking

Freelancers face a unique problem: they're often doing work that's fast, fragmented, and spread across multiple clients throughout the day. A 10-minute fix here, a 30-minute review there, a quick client call in between. These small tasks add up — but they're exactly the ones that never get logged.

The conventional tools make this worse, not better. Toggl and Clockify require you to remember to start and stop a timer for every piece of work. In practice, most freelancers forget half the time. You're in the middle of a task, focused, and the last thing you want to do is open a timer app. So you don't. And the hours disappear.

Manual logging at the end of the day has the same problem in reverse: by the time you sit down to write in your hours, you can only remember the big chunks. All the small tasks — the ones that took 15 minutes each but added up to two hours — are gone. You undercharge because you can't prove the work.

The Tidst approach: track from what you already do

Tidst works differently from every other time tracking tool because it doesn't ask you to change anything about how you work. If you're already using Todoist to manage your freelance tasks — and most freelancers are — then Tidst simply reads what you've completed and turns that into time entries.

Every task you complete in Todoist automatically appears in The Queue in Tidst. The Queue shows the task name, the client project it belongs to, and the date. You open The Queue, add the hours you spent on each task, and approve. It takes two minutes. There's no switching between apps while you're working, no timers to start or stop, and nothing to remember.

For even faster logging, you can add a time label to a task in Todoist before you complete it — @15min, @30min, @60min, or @90min. When the task lands in The Queue, the duration is already pre-filled. That means you can log billable time without ever opening Tidst at all.

What freelancers get out of it

The most direct benefit is more accurate invoicing. When every completed task is captured automatically — including the small ones — you charge for everything you actually did. Freelancers using Tidst report recovering an average of 12 additional billable hours per month.

Beyond invoicing, Tidst gives you visibility into where your time actually goes. The report view breaks down hours per project and per client, with revenue totals based on the hourly rates you set. This is useful not just for invoicing, but for understanding which clients are profitable and which are eating your time without paying for it.

You can also set monthly budget goals per project — either hour budgets or revenue targets — and track your progress against them in real time. If a client project is on track to go over budget, you'll see it before the month is over, not after.

How it fits into a freelance workflow

A typical Tidst workflow for a freelancer looks like this: you manage all your client tasks in Todoist, organized by project. You work through your tasks during the day — adding time labels to tasks when you have a sense of how long they'll take. At the end of the day (or the end of the week), you open Tidst, review The Queue, fill in any times that weren't pre-filled by labels, and approve the entries.

When it's time to invoice, you go to Reports, filter by client and date range, and export a PDF or CSV. The report shows every task you completed for that client, with hours and rates. You copy the total into your invoice.

The whole system adds about five minutes to your day. That's the price of accurate time tracking when you're using Tidst.

How Tidst compares to other freelance time trackers

Getting started

Tidst costs $3/month with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required. Setup takes under a minute: create an account, connect Todoist via OAuth, and your completed tasks start appearing in The Queue immediately.

Learn more about how time tracking in Todoist works or see how automatic tracking compares to manual methods.