How to keep track of time

Question

This is just a general question. I started working from home a few months ago and i find the hardest part is trying to keep track of what I'm working on and how much time was spent. I do both programming and network admin work. Is there any software packages (free) out there that some of you use?

Answer 1

Try ManicTime. It's free and tracks used application. You can tag time as you wish afterwards. Take a look at the screencasts on its website.

However, it's available for Windows only.

Answer 2

What OS are you planning to use it on?

I develop on GNU/Linux and I find a very good and unobrusive applet is Hamster. It is recently become part of Gnome and is very actively developed. I recently also discovered task warrior, that is a commandline app, and therefore can be easily used from everywhere via ssh.

Answer 3

I've always found TimeSnapper to be helpful in remembering what I spent my time on. It will take small screenshots of your desktop at a pre-defined interval and store them. You can then play back the snapshots in sequence like a low-res movie of what you did on your computer that day.

This tool doesn't give you a way to create a spreadsheet or report of how you spent your time (at least the free version doesn't, though the Pro paid version appears to have some features geared toward this), but it's immensely helpful in going back at the end of the day/week to figure out what you spent your time on.

Answer 4

Task Coach

Task Coach is a simple open source todo manager to manage personal tasks and todo lists. It grew out of Frank's frustration that well-known task managers, such as those provided with Outlook or Lotus Notes, do not provide facilities for composite tasks. Often, tasks and other things todo consist of several activities. Task Coach is designed to deal with composite tasks.

Here's also an online site with a free limited account :

myHours.com

myHours.com is a time management, timesheet, time tracking solution. It enables you to track your work time, projects you work on and tasks you perform. It is web based and can be used from any location at any time.

If not, here is a site pretending to list dozens of such Time-tracking Freeware.

Answer 5

I use RescueTime to track what I am doing. The free version only tracks which applications you use (and not which files are opened) but for me that is sufficient. One exception to this are browsers. For those all visited urls are tracked.

What I like about it is that you can track goals like "less then 1 hour/day on superuser.com". You can even get a notification if you exceed this time.

Answer 6

Keep a journal. I use notepad, and it's good to keep it in plaintext so it is easily searchable. Each day I write down the time I start a task, any useful notes as I work, and each time I switch a task, it gets a new time entry.

At the end of the day I can tell how much time was spent on each task (which helps in doing my charge codes), and I have a searchable archive, going back years, of tasks I've worked on and useful notes about them. A year later when someone asks me a question about something I've seen before, I can do a search, and often find the notes from the day that I solved it before. If I know the date, I can find related documents and emails from that time period too.

Answer 7

I use Paymo. Very simple, and has invoicing. For basic personal use, or freelance use you can use it for free without any troubles.

Answer 8

Use Time Tracker. It's online so it will work cross-platform. You can create multiple timers and start/stop them as you please:

Answer 9

I use SlimTimer. I can enter any kind of task in advance or as-needed, and then when I work, I just click on the current task. SlimTimer keeps a record of all the tasks and allows you to get reports per day/week/and so on. You can even add tags and purposes per task, so you can have one task name for yourself and generate reports with customer-suited descriptions instead.

It's brilliant because it's just a small web app that can live in a popup, out of the way. It doesn't have too many features -- which is a feature in itself! Simple, clean, fast.

Answer 10

Do you have a hosting account or your own server? If you do, you can install collabtive. I have used it to keep track of projects for a while now and it has the extra benefit of being able to access it anywhere. It also is open source so if you need any extra functionality it can be added based on your needs.

Answer 11

I really like Rachota. It's Java based and very easy to use.

Answer 12

So many choices, but I use Toggl. It's a web app and it has desktop clients for Linux, Windows and Mac. It's the most simple solution I've found.

Answer 13

orgmode, plain-text based life organizer. TOTALLY worth the steep learning curve.

Answer 14

Try opentempus.org it store data in local but you can use googledocs for storaging also.

I think this app uses the best approach, very simple, doesn't required user time input (works itself on background) and has very complete reports (and its opensource also)

Answer 15

I helped build and use Intervals for time tracking. It's an online app and does a few other things as well, like task tracking. Anyways, check it out.

Answer 16

If online, colorhat's quite awesome: http://colorhat.com/try

Answer 17

Procrastination Tracker is really awesome, it allows you to categorise and drill down to very minute details.

Answer 18

A commercial alternative is Time Doctor, which is able take screenshots over some period of time, and report on keyboard and mouse activity.