Grindstone

Grindstone, developed by Epiforge Software, is a free application designed to simplify and enhance time tracking for individuals, small businesses, and larger organizations. According to the vendor, Grindstone is a valuable tool for various professions and industries, including freelancers, project managers, consultants, software developers, and marketing agencies. By accurately recording work duration and providing customizable properties and views, Grindstone aims to streamline time management and improve productivity for users.

Key Features

Time Tracking: According to the vendor, Grindstone enables users to easily and accurately track their time by creating work items and starting time slices to record work duration. The application automatically generates new work items if a name is entered that does not already exist, and it offers quick entry functionality for inputting multiple work items simultaneously. Additionally, Grindstone prompts users to record time spent away from their computer and makes necessary corrections to the recorded time.

Properties: Each work item in Grindstone has a default name and a field for general notes. Users can also create custom properties to store additional information for each work item. According to the vendor, these properties can be used to associate work items with case numbers, URLs, or any other relevant data. List properties are available to assign work items to specific clients or predefined list values. Grindstone allows customization of properties to adapt to the user's organizational structure.

Views: Grindstone organizes all tracked information through views, which can be created for different entities such as work items, time slices, properties, list values, people, or assignments. Users can apply filter conditions to views to display specific subsets of data and set up monitored views to receive notifications when changes occur that match the view's filters. Predefined views, including those for approaching due dates and exceeding estimates, are also available.

Data Export: Grindstone offers convenient data export options for any information displayed in a view. Users can export data to various file formats or copy it to the clipboard. The application also provides a graph feature that allows users to generate graphical or tabular representations of view data. According to the vendor, graphs can be customized with mathematical operations and a variety of chart options, and the results can be copied or saved to a file for further analysis.