Rothko runs a coffee shop. Each week she needs to calculate how many hours each employee worked, given their clock-in and clock-out times. It turns out that this is a surprisingly painful task to perform using regular tools like calculators or spreadsheets. I built a Mac dashboard widget to make it easier . I’m putting it up for download because I can imagine other people might find it useful. (For example, anyone who has to fill out paper timesheets.)
To use it, enter times in the "start" and "end" fields for each day. You can use 12 or 24 hour clock. For 12 hour clock, if there’s an "a" in the field it’s a.m., if there’s a "p" it’s p.m. You only need to type the colon and number of minutes if there’s an actual number of minutes involved. (It’s all about reducing the number of keystrokes.)
Tab takes you on to the next field as usual, and automatically recalculates everything like a spreadsheet. The individual durations worked for each day are shown, and totaled into a final figure in hours and minutes at the bottom.
So for a standard work day, you’d type 9a [tab] 5p [tab] and it would enter 9:00 am start, 5:00 pm finish, calculate the duration as 8:00, and add it to the total.
The only other control is the Reset button, which blanks out the fields ready for the next calculation. Quick, simple, efficient, and hopefully correct…
