

Ask HN: Time tracking - ctingom

Hi all, I'm building a time tracking application. I'm curious about your personal time tracking preferences:<p>Do you track your time mostly after the fact?<p>Not at all?<p>Track time mostly throughout the day (stopwatch)?<p>I ask, because we have a Stopwatch mode in our application and a manual time entry mode and I'm curious which one will be most popular and to focus our efforts.<p>Thanks...
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cheekysod
I use TaskTrack:

<http://www.bushsoftware.com/TaskTrack/TaskTrack.html>

no setup required, and it tracks exactly how long you spend on each document
during the day; so all you have to do is group the documents into tasks and
you have the total time spent.

its actually made this stuff a heap easier than it was for me, I never used to
bother until the end of the week, now I still dont, but the numbers are right
:)

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ctingom
Sounds like a nice app, sort of like RescueTime.

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scorpioxy
Echoing on what @mkuhn said, i would normally like to use a stopwatch mode
when i would be doing something for a long period of time. For example, half a
day's work for project A and then switching to project B or something like
that.

Otherwise, i tend to just use time slots and fill then in at the end of the
day in a spreadsheet. Mechanical and tedious, but it does the job. Of course,
it doesn't really help unless i remember to fill the information in.

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mkuhn
For me its something I normaly do at the end of my workday. Fiddling with a
stopwatch mode throughout the whole day would be somewhat to much effort for
me.

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ctingom
Thanks for the feedback!

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brusqe
Presumably this is for <http://www.minuteglass.com/>? If you are after any
significantly large sample data to base some usability/design decisions on,
I'd recommend Amazon Mechanical Turk.

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ctingom
Yes, I'm the designer behind Minuteglass and I'll think about using the
Mechanical Turk to get some feedback.

Thanks.

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chris11
I've just been keeping a time log for the past few days. I'm not sure how long
I will keep doing it, but right now it works so I just my cell phone for the
time, and a piece of paper to write down what I'm doing throughout the day.

