time tracking

It’s the twenty fourth today, and people who have been good will soon get things, and those who haven’t will get a lump of coal. Given enough pressure that coal could become a diamond. At such a time it’s interesting to take stock of how productive, or unproductive the year has been. One tool with which to do this is timetagger. Timetagger is either a free app, if you set it up on a local machine, or a paying app if you use a cloud services version.

What makes this app interesting is that it allows you to keep track of tasks by title, and tags. Imagine that you’re writing a blog post. You can use writing, blogging and relevant terms to make finding all time spent working on a specific topic quick and easy.

Resume

An interesting feature of this app is that if you work on a task, and then get interrupted to make coffee or for a fire drill you can pause the activity, and then return and set a second start time. You can count the same task and keywords more than once. If you have a task that you do on a regular basis this saves time.

Simple to Use

To start tracking you press play. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at yesterday or another day. It will automatically start “today”. You then press stop and you’re done.

At the end of the day, week, month or quarter you can see a report for specific tags in isolation, or relevant tags. It’s quick and easy to use.

So far I have tracked twenty hours but by this time next year I will have tracked several hundred. I find that by using this server based app I don’t kill the battery on my phone as fast as before. I start the timer and know precisely what I have been working on. I know by title and tags.

If you’re tracking for yourself then you can add as many tags as you want, but if you’re tracking for a client then avoid using more than one tag, unless requested to use more. I experimented with reports and you can select to see all “linux” time, but you also see secondary tags. This might look less professional if you use this app to track time spent professionally.

If you’re working as a freelancer you can use the name of a client as the tag and log the time you arrive, and the time you leave. Even if you don’t need to give a time sheet you can double check it to make sure that the hours are correct.

A To Do Variant

For a while I was playing with To Do apps. You give yourself tasks that you have to complete on a daily, weekly or other basis and you just tick that you did it. Time tracking is taking the To Do list a step further. You’re actually tracking the time that you spend on a task, daily fo weeks or months at a time. It’s important to account for the time you spent, not just what you did.

It’s a good habit to have, whether you’re being paid to track or not. If you get into this habit, in your free time it will be able to do this automatically when you can justify your hours. This app only allows you to track one activity at a time. You can start a second activity but it will pause the first. You can’t track “Time spent in the office”, and then “time spent on a sub task”, at the office.

Self Hosting vs Paid Solution

Self hosting is free but you need to configure the app, and make it accessible when you’re away from the server. With paid solution, for three francs per month you have access from anywhere.

And Finally

With this app you can track the time you spend filming an event, and then you can track the time you spend ingesting footage, logging and more. You can track the time you spend editing and then the time you spend exporting the video files. You can then track time spent on modifications. The application is highly modular and you can start and stop timers with ease, and tag tasks.

The beauty of self-hosting on your local network is that the data is private. No one can use it, other than you, and those you hand reports to. Other solutions may use AI and other tools to quantify the data you give them.

With TimeLogger you could track “learning Linux” or “Learning German”. With this you can track “learning ‘irgendwie’, ‘irgendwo’, ‘irgendwas'” and more. It’s as modular as you want it to be.