Tracking time
June 17, 2008 – 3:01 pmRationale
I, being a software developer, team leader, project manager and,
generally, a busy person, desperately need time tracking and planning
tools.
More exactly stated, it’s not the tool I need, but I need instant
answers to questions, whenever I’d like:
- where my time had gone?
- what’s the closest checkpoint time for every developer online?
- how much time my team mates spent and what task it was?
- how much time I have to bill my customer (per customer per project)?
- how much I have to pay to my developers (per developer, obviously)?
These questions are very different, require different information to
be collected and different decisions are to be made using the answers.
Personal time flow
Record attention flow (mouse pointer, active and top windows, keyb
activity) for future analysis.
Analysis result should within single graph depict time flow and how it
was really spent on different tasks.
Problem: how define “tasks” automatically/semiautomatically?
Similar solutions:
- (link to macosx solution lost)
- gfocustimer - declares to watch the focus, but doesn’t seem to work
How to implement:
- clone X11 xev to record X events to the database
- analyze db with a custom script
Communicate checkpoints
Since our usual communication channel is a jabber room, the solution
should be probably a jabber bot, residing there, monitoring what is
said and keeping a checkpoints record.
A log of some kind would be useful too.
Similar solutions: any?
How to implement: go and hack; it should be simple.
Track billable time
This, probably, should be a simple start-stop watch residing in a dock
area or completely off-screen.
It should record tasks and start/stop events to a local db, allow user
to edit it and report it upstream.
Similar solutions:
How to implement: since there are vast number of time-counting
programs, the task boils down to integrating them with some protocol.
Consolidate billable time
Get updates from solution, crafted in the previous part, and drop it
into bigger db. This time the resulting db probably should be sql,
for the ease of reporting.
This also should integrate with Trac somehow.
Similar solutions: see above - everything starts with the protocol
How to implement: hack it.
Summary
This pretty much outlines what I need from time-tracking tools. Few
(if any) solutions are ready, so most of them are to be hacked out
ourselves. Will be glad to be proved wrong.
Now, well, the estimation is the whole different story.
3 Responses to “Tracking time”
Hi Andrey! Nice article. Have you ever looked at using a simple, pre-made time tracking tool? I’ve been using the Tsheets tool for about a month now, and it’s been both very helpful AND very eye opening on how, where, and on what I spend my time. Just a thought…
By Oxiana on Jun 18, 2008
Oxiana:
There’s no problem with tracking time itself. It’s the time it takes.
Tool that sits quietly at my dock area, records my actions and helps then to see where the time was spent is much more valuable.
Other emm… facets of the time tracking are more about communicating timesheets and operating them, not tracking time.
By Andrey Khavryuchenko on Jun 18, 2008
Have you checked out Rescue Time? I have heard a lot of great things about it.
By John on Jun 19, 2008