A work log for freelancers that fills itself in
Friday afternoon, timesheet open, and the week is a blur. Which client got Tuesday morning? How long did that revision really take? Most freelancers rebuild the week from email, commits and memory, and round everything to the nearest guess.
Write it down while it is happening
Hourly is a small Windows tray app that asks you once every hour of real activity: "What did you just do?" You answer in one sentence, for example "Acme: second round of logo revisions", and it is saved with the time. A locked screen and sleep pause the clock, so you are not asked about time away.
By the end of the week you have an hour by hour record in your own words, ready to turn into a timesheet, an invoice description or a client update.
Tips that make it work for client work
- Start each entry with the client or project name. Later you can search or group by it.
- Use the one skip per day for a long call or deep work you do not want to interrupt.
- Export the week as Markdown, text or JSON and ask an AI assistant to group it by client and write the summary for you.
- Keep the log in your Obsidian daily notes if that is where you already plan your work.
What Hourly is not
It is not a billing tool. It has no timers, hourly rates, invoices or client reports, and it does not measure exact durations: an entry says what you did in that hour, not to the minute. If you bill to the minute, use a timer for that and Hourly for the record of what the time was actually spent on.
Private by design
Client work is confidential. Hourly has no account and no cloud: your entries stay in a file on your computer and nothing you type is sent anywhere.