How Long Did That Launch Actually Take? Now You Can Answer That

You ran the audit, built the checklist, chased down the broken links, checked every page on desktop, tablet, and mobile, and shipped the site. Somewhere in the client's inbox is an invoice for it. What isn't anywhere is a record of how long it actually took — so next time someone asks "how long should I quote for a migration like this?", the honest answer is a shrug.

This release adds time tracking, built directly against the launch and migration projects you're already running. A small browser extension starts and stops a timer against whichever project you're working on; a report screen shows you where the hours actually went, per project and across all of them. It's small on purpose — no invoicing module, no client-facing timesheets, just an honest record of the time a project cost, sitting next to the checklist that describes the work.

---

Why this, and why now

Every audit-and-launch tool in this toolkit exists to close a gap between two things that should obviously be connected but usually aren't — the audit and the checklist, the crawl and the redirect map, the alert and the to-do item. Time is the same shape of problem. You're already tracking what needs doing, project by project. Nothing was tracking how long it took to do it, so that information either lived in a freelancer's memory (which fades) or a separate timer app with no idea a "launch project" even exists (so you're retyping which client, which site, by hand, every single time).

The fix follows the same idea as everything else here: put the timer where the work already is. Open the extension, pick the project you're already looking at, and go. The time lands against that exact project automatically — no separate app, no re-typing which client this was for.

---

Setting it up

Two things need doing once, and then you never think about them again.

1. Get an operator token. In the admin console, under Time tracking → Operators, mint a token with your name on it. It's shown to you exactly once — copy it somewhere safe, because it can't be retrieved again after that (the same way a generated password can't). Each person tracking time gets their own token, so a report can always tell whose hours are whose.

2. Point the extension at your server. Load the extension, open its Settings page, and paste in your server's URL and the operator token you just minted. Hit Test Connection — it should list back the projects it can see. If it does, you're done.

That's the whole setup. No account creation, no separate login — the token is your identity as far as the extension is concerned.

---

Using it day to day

The extension lives in your browser toolbar. Click it, and you get two tabs:

Track Time — pick a project from the dropdown (every active launch, migration, and custom project you have shows up here), optionally pick a category if you want to break your time down by activity type (Design, Development, Client calls — whatever categories your admin has set up), jot a one-line description of what you're doing, and hit Start Timer. The toolbar badge ticks up with the elapsed time so you always know a timer's running. Hit Stop Timer when you're done, and the entry saves itself.

Forgot to start it, or worked on something you want to log after the fact? The same screen has a manual entry form — pick the project, set a start and end time, save. No timer required.

Today — a running list of everything you've logged today, with a total at the bottom. Useful for the "wait, did I actually log that call?" moment at 5pm.

That's genuinely most of it. The extension is deliberately a manual, semi-automatic timer — it doesn't watch your browsing, doesn't know what tabs you have open, doesn't try to guess what you're working on. It only ever records what you tell it: a project, an optional category, a description, and a start and stop.

---

Where the hours actually went

Tracking time is only useful if you can see it afterwards, so there are two views, at two different altitudes.

On the project itself, there's now a Time tab alongside the checklist. It's read-only by design — the extension is the only thing that starts and stops a timer, the same way the crawler is the only thing that finds an issue — but you can filter by date range and see every entry logged against that one project, plus a CSV export if you need the raw numbers elsewhere.

Across every project, the admin console has a new Time reports screen. This is the one that actually answers "how long did that launch take" and its harder sibling, "how long do launches like this usually take." Filter by report type (daily, weekly, monthly), by operator, by project, by category, by date range, and you get:

• A Time by project/domain table — exactly the number you want when a client asks what a job actually cost in hours, or when you're sanity-checking a quote against reality.
• Entries grouped by period, each with its own category breakdown, so you can see not just how much time went into a project but what kind of work it was.
• A couple of charts — time by category, time trend across the periods you're looking at — for when a table of numbers doesn't tell the story as fast as a bar does.

None of this requires you to set anything up beyond the two steps above. The report is just asking the same data the extension has been quietly collecting the whole time.

---

Putting it together

A real week, with time tracking in the loop:

1. Mint yourself an operator token once, paste it into the extension's settings, done.
2. Open a launch project's page in the morning, click the extension, pick that project, hit Start Timer, and get on with the checklist.
3. Switch to a different client's migration project after lunch — stop the first timer, pick the new project, start again. Add a category if it's useful ("Redirect mapping", say).
4. At the end of the week, open Time reports in the admin console, filter to the last 7 days, and see exactly how the week split across clients — and whether that migration really did eat twice the time the launch did, or just felt that way.
5. Next time someone asks for a quote on a similar job, you've got last time's actual numbers instead of a guess.

The audit tool already knew what needed doing. Now it knows how long doing it takes.