On: How to Track Your Engineering Work

[al_borland]

I had to track everything I did for a while, then fill out weekly reports that were due monthly. I ended up writing something similar, where it would log everything to a single file with a timestamp. I then had some commands that would let me pull back the previous day, previous n days, or any specified date range.

Eventually I changed this up and made something that I could trigger with a keyboard shortcut, would pull up a prompt, and append it to a daily note I had in Obsidian.

I don't have to track things as much anymore and I noticed I became a lot more productive and a bit more happy when I wasn't worried about accounting for every minute of my work day.

[codazoda → al_borland]

I’ve been using Obsidian lately. I’m curious to know more about what you did to pull up a prompt. That could be a slick change.

I also tried to do this for work, not because I was required to but because I was curious, and I also found it exhausting. Maybe logging only the main things would feel better.

[al_borland → codazoda]

I’ve done the text prompt a couple different ways.

One was with HammerSpoon. The config is in Lua. I could bind a function to a keyboard shortcut, have it bring up a text field, and append the input to my file based on getting the current date.

I also did something similar with AppleScript (which actually uses some JavaScript now) and used the native features of macOS to setup a keyboard shortcut. If I remember correctly this required some nonsense with Automator (maybe Shortcuts would be the way to go now). All of this was done because I was having some weird behaviors and wanted to get rid of HammerSpoon to reduce possible causes. HammerSpoon didn’t seem to be the problem.

Previously when I was on Windows I’d use AutoHotKey for this kind of thing.