Most freelancers who track their time never look at it. The entries pile up, the invoice gets built from them once a month, and that is the extent of the relationship. A weekly time review changes that for the cost of 15 minutes on Friday afternoon. It catches the hours you forgot to log while you can still remember them, tells you which invoice to send before the weekend, and gives you an honest picture of the week before you plan the next one.
Here is the checklist. Do it in order; it gets faster every week.
1. Fill the gaps (5 minutes)
Open the week view and look for the holes. A Tuesday with three logged hours and a full calendar is a Tuesday with five hours missing. Walk through the calendar and your sent emails for that day and log what you find: the call, the review, the proposal you wrote at lunch. Be specific in the description, because next week you will not remember what "misc" was.
This is the step that pays for the whole habit. Forgotten hours are the most common way freelancers underbill, and a gap that is one day old is easy to fill. One that is three weeks old is gone. If you tend to start timers and forget them, Gigtime now stops any timer still running after 24 hours and saves an entry you can correct, which keeps the gaps from turning into 30-hour blobs.
2. Fix the flags (2 minutes)
Scan the billable switch on each entry. Internal admin marked billable will embarrass you on an invoice; client work marked non-billable is money you will not see. Then check that every entry has a client and a project. Entries with neither show up in an "unassigned" banner, and they can be assigned in bulk, so this step is usually a single click.
3. Look at the totals (3 minutes)
Three numbers, in this order:
- Total hours against your goal. Not to judge the week, but to notice a trend. Three short weeks in a row is a signal, either that you are under-booked or under-logging.
- Billable share. If it is far below your usual ratio, find out which non-billable bucket grew. Sales? Admin? A client "quick question" habit? Our post on realistic billable hours per week explains what a normal ratio looks like.
- Hours per project against its cap. Any project past 80 percent of its budget gets a message to the client today, not after it blows through.
4. Bill what is ready (3 minutes)
Look at unbilled hours by client. Any client whose billing terms say "weekly" or whose project just finished gets an invoice now, built from the entries you just cleaned up. Friday invoices get paid faster than Monday ones for a dull reason: they land before the client's weekly payment run, not after. For everything else, note what is accumulating so month-end does not surprise you. The dashboard shows unbilled hours as a single number, which is a good one to glance at before closing the laptop.
5. Plan next week in one line (2 minutes)
You now know what is due, what is over budget, and which days were productive. Write one line: the single most important deliverable for next week and which day it gets. That is the whole plan. Detailed weekly planning tends to get thrown out by Tuesday; one anchor survives.
Making it stick
Put it in the calendar as a recurring 15-minute block on Friday, after your last client work and before you would normally stop. Do it even on weeks where you think there is nothing to review; those are the weeks with the most gaps. If Friday is a non-working day for you, Thursday evening works just as well. The point is the rhythm, not the day.
After a couple of months the review becomes the place where you actually run your business: rates get questioned here, scope creep gets caught here, and the decision to drop a client usually starts here. Not bad for 15 minutes.
Where each step lives in Gigtime
If you track in Gigtime, the checklist maps to five screens. Gaps: the Week tab on Entries, where each day shows its own subtotal and an empty afternoon stands out. Flags: the filter bar on the same page, cycled to non-billable, and the orange unassigned banner at the top when entries have no client. Totals: the Home dashboard for hours against your goal, and the project pages for hours against their caps. Billing: the Unbilled figure on the dashboard, and Create Invoice, which pulls in the week's entries for a client. The plan line goes wherever you keep plans; the app does not need to know about it.
If you are not tracking yet, the review is a good reason to start. Try Gigtime free for 30 days, log one week, and run the checklist on Friday. The first review is always the most revealing.