
Ask HN: How do you track time? - grinich
Tools &#38; techniques?
======
pasbesoin
In a previous job, I sometimes had to context switch often and on short
notice. I'd invariably lose track of my time allocations. I needed to keep
track of billable hours across often 3,5,7, or more projects and tasks (and
categorizations of work type) at a time, and manual recording was just not
cutting it.

This was a Windows shop, and I found, of all things, a little AutoHotKey
script whose interface was, in the main, exactly what I was looking for.

At a predetermined interval, it would pop up a dialog asking whether I was
still doing the same thing. The dialog was on top but did NOT steal focus. If
I was in the middle of typing something, I could continue uninterrupted.

If I was doing the same thing, one click to dismiss. If not, I could select
one of an active set of items from a dropdown list, and time recording would
start logging that item instead. If I was doing something new, I could type it
into the textbox at the head of the dropdown list, and it would become the
identifier for the new record. No additional dialog or multiple step set up:
Just type it in and go.

Also, if I remembered to do so, upon context switch I could click its icon in
the taskbar to get the same prompt immediately.

Data was saved as simple CSV or similar. I could suck it into whatever I
wanted and sum and reconcile it there. Typically, I'd do this in Excel, and it
would go quite quickly.

I set the time interval to 5 minutes; that was enough resolution for my
billing. It sounds annoying, perhaps, but I quickly got used to it and
responded mostly automatically.

There were two problems:

1) It was buggy. A subset of records would have their start and/or stop times
recorded incorrectly. I could fix them manually, when summing and reconciling,
but grumble.

2) I would have liked a further interface to tweak records on the fly, for
when I recorded the wrong item, got called away from my desk, or whatever,
while the program continued to measure my time under the last/wrong event.

I never got around to learning AutoHotKey's scripting and improving it.

That job is over with, now. And perhaps that is in a way a comment on the need
for such time recording. If your time, ore measure of same, is becoming that
fragmented, you may want to consider an environment that is less fragmented.

------
elcron
For linux ktimetracker which can automatically time a task only when it's in a
certain desktop. Of course my main reason for using it was to keep myself from
wasting too much time on hn and other websites. :)

