For almost a decade, I was paid on a 1099.
And here's the part that might surprise you: I wasn't careless. I tracked my hours for part of my work. Another part of my work paid me like clockwork, the same way a salary does. I had records. I thought that was enough.
It wasn't — because I was tracking the wrong things.
Hours on a timesheet tell you almost nothing about the question that actually matters: what was the real working relationship? Who set my schedule? Who assigned the work? Could I say no? Was I answering messages before sunrise and after dinner, on weekends, on holidays? Was my work woven into the core of someone else's business — not one project at a time, but everywhere, all the time?
I lived those answers every day for nearly ten years. I just never captured them anywhere.
And if I'm honest, the question itself wasn't new. It had been building quietly for a long time — every time the paperwork said "independent contractor" and my daily life said something different. I kept setting it aside, the way you do when the work is steady and the relationship matters to you.
Then, after nearly a decade, the working relationship ended. That's when I learned firsthand what the end looks like for a 1099 worker: no severance framework, no unemployment eligibility, no safety net at all. What followed were the hardest months of my life — and the most clarifying. I wasn't looking for a fight. I was finally looking for answers I should have demanded of myself years earlier: Was I ever really an independent contractor? What rights did I actually have?
My timesheets couldn't answer that. The answer was scattered across years of text threads, call logs, calendars, and memory. Reconstructing it took months of sorting thousands of messages into a timeline a professional could actually evaluate. I did that work at the lowest point, financially and emotionally, I had ever been. Then I retained an employment lawyer, asserted my rights, and my dispute resolved in a settlement. That resolution speaks for itself, and I'll leave it there.
This site exists because of what that reconstruction taught me: the facts that decide worker classification are the ones almost nobody writes down while they're happening. Not your hours — the relationship. The 5 a.m. text. The task list that looks like any employee's. The permission you had to ask for. The tools and logins that weren't yours. The pattern, week after week, year after year.
Every tool here captures what my timesheets missed: an after-hours log for work outside normal hours while it's fresh, a message organizer that turns a chaotic phone into a timeline, worksheets that ask the relationship questions I didn't know to ask myself, and a prep packet so that if you ever sit across from an employment lawyer, you arrive organized instead of overwhelmed.
I'm not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal advice. I can't tell you whether you're misclassified — no checklist can, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. What I can tell you is this: a worker who documents the relationship — not just the hours — is in a fundamentally different position than one who doesn't, whether or not a dispute ever comes.
Everything here is free. Start with the two-minute check, and keep your originals.
— Erica