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Track time and take notes in one place

March 2026 · 4 min read

If you're a freelancer, you probably track your hours in one app and write your notes somewhere else — a text file, Notion, a physical notebook, or just your memory. At the end of the week, you try to match your time entries with what you actually did. Half the context is gone.

This is the problem Tympo was built to solve.

The context gap

A typical time entry in most trackers looks like this: "Client A — Development — 2h 30m". That's it. Three weeks later, when the client asks what you worked on, you're staring at a list of durations trying to remember what "Development" meant on that particular Tuesday.

The issue isn't that you didn't take notes. You probably did — somewhere. The issue is that your notes and your time entries live in different places. The link between "what I did" and "how long it took" breaks the moment you close your tracker.

Notes where you need them

In Tympo, every time entry has a rich text notes field. You write as you work — not after. The notes sit right below your timer, so jotting something down takes zero friction.

The editor supports the basics you'd expect: bold, italic, strikethrough, bullet lists, numbered lists. Nothing fancy, nothing that gets in the way. It's powered by Tiptap, the same editor that runs inside GitLab and many other production apps.

When you stop the timer, the notes save with the entry. When you look at your history, the notes are right there next to the duration and the client name. The context stays intact.

What to write in your notes

The best approach is to write notes like you'd write them for a colleague who might pick up your work tomorrow. Here are patterns that work well:

• Decisions made — "Client approved the blue version. Discarded the grid layout."
• Blockers hit — "Waiting on API credentials from IT. Emailed Jan."
• What was delivered — "Deployed invoice template v2 to staging."
• Questions raised — "Need to confirm: do they want the export in CSV or Excel?"
• Ticket or reference numbers — "Fixed JIRA-4521. Root cause was a timezone conversion bug."

You don't need to write an essay. Two sentences per entry is enough to rebuild context weeks later.

Export and use your notes

Notes become even more valuable when you export them. Tympo Pro lets you export your time logs in three formats:

• CSV — for spreadsheets, accounting, or importing into other tools. Notes are included as a column.
• Formatted notes — a clean markdown file organized by date and client, with your notes as the main content. Perfect for pasting into Obsidian, Notion, or a wiki.
• Anonymized notes — the same export, but with client names replaced by aliases (Client A, Client B). This is designed for situations where you want to process your logs with AI tools without exposing confidential client information.

The anonymized export

This one deserves its own explanation because it solves a real problem. Many freelancers want to use AI (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) to organize, summarize, or process their work logs. Maybe you want to generate a weekly report, categorize your tasks, or format your notes for a personal knowledge base.

But your work logs contain client names, project names, and sometimes sensitive details. You can't just paste them into an AI chat.

Tympo's anonymized export replaces all client names with generic aliases — "Client A", "Client B" — while keeping everything else intact. You get a file that's safe to share with any tool, without violating NDAs or trust.

The best time to take notes is while you're working. The second best time doesn't exist — you'll forget.

Try it

If you're tracking time without notes, you're losing the most valuable part of your work log: the context. Tympo puts notes right where they belong — next to the timer.