An AdjunctWorld member emailed me recently about the frustration I'm sure many of us feel when we consider the time and effort we put into our classes along with the amount of money paid-per-class, especially when paid adjunct rates.

We've been chatting back and forth about ways to help adjuncts calculate time spent vs. money earned - not necessarily to depress anyone but rather to prepare folks who want to adjunct teach, to motivate us to find ways of streamlining our efforts/finding efficiency in our work, or to have data to support adjunct advocacy.

I myself have tried using spreadsheets and such to keep track of my hours vs. paychecks and found it time consuming in and of itself. And at the end of the day I did not feel that the numbers were quite representative of my work (i.e., "Did I count that time I spent an hour crafting a careful email to a student who plagiarized?"). I've done some digging and found a list of Time-Tracking Apps that Entrepreneur.com compiled to help work-from-homers and other independent contractors keep track of their output vs. input. I thought I'd share this list with you.

1. Due Time Tracking
2. Sighted Time Tracking and Invoicing
3. Harvest
4. Top Tracker
5. Tick
6. RescueTime
7. Toggl
8. Klok Desktop Application

I myself tried Klok once upon a time. I found it helpful. If you are interested in keeping track of your hours spent in the classroom - virtual or on-campus - give one of these a try.