The timer is everywhere in time tracking software. Start it when you begin. Stop it when you switch tasks. Forget to stop it and you’ve been “working” for four hours straight when you actually walked to the kitchen, took a call, and had lunch.
Every time tracker I tried before building Fract was built around this assumption: that professional work happens in clean, uninterrupted blocks that you can bracket with a start and a stop.
It doesn’t. And the timer model creates a kind of cognitive tax — now you’re managing the tracking alongside the actual work, which means you’re always doing two things at once.
The way professional work actually happens
Think about your actual workday. You’re on a client call. It ends. You spend 20 minutes on a follow-up email. You switch to a different client for a document review. You field a Slack message from the first client. You’re back in the document.
In a timer-based system, this is a nightmare. Which timer is running? When did you switch? Did you forget to pause?
Most people do one of two things: they run a single timer for the whole day and then try to manually split it at the end (which means guessing, which means inaccuracy), or they give up on the timer and try to reconstruct time from memory at the end of the week (which is even worse).
Professional time isn’t a continuous stream. It’s a collection of discrete activities. The right tool should reflect that.
Retrospective tracking is more accurate
The insight behind Fract is that you don’t need to track time in real-time — you need to record it at the point of completion, when you actually know how long something took.
When you finish a call, you tap once for every 6 minutes it took. You know it was about 45 minutes: seven taps. Done in five seconds, accurate to 0.1 hours — the billing standard professionals have used for decades.
You’re not managing a running timer. You’re logging what happened, which is what you actually know.
This is how lawyers have worked for generations. They don’t timer their way through a day — they record time in 0.1-hour increments as they complete work. The increment exists because it matches the resolution at which professional time meaningfully varies: six minutes is the smallest unit that matters on an invoice.
Why this matters more than it seems
The problem with inaccurate time tracking isn’t just that you might undercharge. It’s that you lose visibility into how you’re actually spending your capacity.
If you’re a fractional professional running multiple client engagements, you need to know whether Client A is consuming 40% of your time or 60%. You need to know which types of work are eating hours without paying for them. You can’t know any of this if your time data is wrong.
The timer makes the data wrong not because people are careless, but because it imposes a model that doesn’t fit the work.
Fract is built on a different model: record what you did, when you’re done, with the precision that billing actually requires. No timers. No forgotten states. No reconstruction at week’s end.
The app is free on the App Store — no account, no cloud, just clean billable time data that’s yours.
Free. No account. iPhone only.