From Unclutterer comes a great post by Zen Habits author Leo Babauta on creating a minimalist workspace. Most of the attorneys I know life among piles of paper. While some defend their “system” of “organization,” most just don’t seem to know how to escape from the paper jungle they created for themselves.

So the first step is for you to consider your requirements for working, and what’s essential to your workflow. If possible, streamline and simplify that workflow and those requirements. Then, once you’ve got that down to a minimum, see what the minimum setup would be for those essentials and your workflow. Eliminate everything unnecessary.

. . .

It’s interesting to note that what you think your requirements are might not be the minimum. They might just be what you’re used to doing.

[photo: Zen Habits]

If you have read much of this blog, you know I have a major obsession with time tracking options. I have tried a variety of options, including Time Matters, Time59 (online), GnoTime, BK Task Timer, TTime, and many more.

All are lacking something. Most are too complicated. Tracking time is an inherently simple thing. All you need is the date, a description, and the time billed. If you have more people in the office, it can be nice to automate the assignment of different rates, but it is just as easy to generate individual time sheets for each employee.

In the end, I have decided to go with a comparatively low-tech solution: spread sheets. Spread sheets are platform-independent, have little or no learning curve (great for new or contract employees), and are far easier to view and edit. Mine automatically computes the total charges billed to date, so it actually takes less time to generate a bill than with a comprehensive package like Time/Billing Matters.

The only thing it doesn’t do is have a timer. In Windows, TTime is an elegant solution. Online timer Toggl is another good solution. Stopwatch works fine in Linux, and I’m sure there are a lot of other options (in addition to just writing down start and end times).

This is a reminder that although technology allows us to do a lot of complicated things, complicated is not always better, particularly for a simple task like tracking time.