In these days of freelancing and precarious employment, more and more people are striking out on their own. It doesn’t have to feel uneasy, though — if you have the right tools and skills.

If you’re thinking of working on your own terms, this lesson bundle is a great place to start.

The job market is changing fast. So while all sorts of gigs are changing or vanishing, freelancing has become a more and more practical way to get work. But when charting your own career course, it can be hard to know where to start.

I recently switched back to freelancing full-time, and whilst I am lucky enough to have clients who don’t ask for precise hourly breakdowns, I have always been intrigued to know how much time I was spending on work tasks, especially those tasks that I didn’t directly bill for.

Many time trackers rely on you explicitly setting the task you are tracking and remembering to switch to another task when it’s time to track that. This is easy to forget, and for someone like me who switches tasks frequently, it’s hard to always know when one task finishes and another begins.

Timing 2 takes a different perspective. Instead of tracking by task, it tracks by application usage and uses a set of rules to assign activities in those applications to certain projects and tasks. The premise is that after a learning process, you can leave the application running behind the scenes and it’ll track everything for you automatically. You only need audit the results.