17 Oct 2007

Logging time

I suppose this is something of a LazyWeb request: for various reasons that I'll explain below, I want an easy way to record, log and report on my activity at work. Before I write something myself, does anyone know of a good tool for doing this? I'd consider a standard Mac application, Unix command line utility, or even an online application at a pinch.

There are loads of invoicing or billing applications out there, but that's not quite what I'm looking for. My time isn't billable (unfortunately), nor do I have clients as such (unless I get all management-speaky about the students and other 'stakeholders', which I hope I'll never do). What I'd like is a very simple and quick way to record a description of what I'm currently working on, and whether it's admin, research or teaching related, then hit a 'record time' button to record how long I work on it. Ideally, I'd also like to record activities after the event, if I have a lecture or a meeting that I'm not able to record actively. I'd like to be able to view and export a simple report of my activity each week, showing total hours and the percentage of time spent on each of my 3 categories of activity. In needs to be very quick and easy to use, and unobtrusive when I want it to be, otherwise I'm never going to use it, and cheap or free because I'm a poor academic.

So, why am I interested in doing such a crazy thing? There are a couple of reasons:

  1. I'm not required to log my time in detail at all, but funding bodies now use the concept of Full Economic Costing (FEC1) when funding grants. As a consequence, we're supposed to record the percentage of time each year that we spend on different categories of research, teaching, admin and so on. We just try to guesstimate it, but I'm a scientist and I'd like to have some actual data to base my guess on.
  2. I'm curious. Juggling teaching and research (not to mention the administrative load of each) is very tricky, so it would be interesting to know just how much time I spend on each. I also feel that recording my time would help me focus without getting distracted, and also provide a bit of positive feedback at the end of the day. I'm feeling very swamped at the moment, so anything that might help seems worth trying. It's very easy to have a madly busy day and feel at the end of it that you haven't accomplished anything, when you've actually got quite a bit done. Alternatively, it could end up totally depressing me -- frankly, it could go either way.

So, do any of you know of any great software that I've missed?

1 See 'Father Ted' for pronunciation. ↑

  1. 1

    I just started using Harvest and love it. http://www.harvestapp.com

    by jim @ 17/10/2007 9:14 pm • Permalink

  • 2

    Recently read this post about YaTimer http://www.making-ripples.com/2007/09/unsolicited-plu.html

    by Tom @ 17/10/2007 9:21 pm • Permalink

  • 3

    http://nixbit.com/cat/office/finance/ruby-time-tracker Does part of what you want. It doesn't do timers though. The standalone (lite) version runs out of a single executable, which launches a web server (provided you have ruby installed).

    by Rob @ 18/10/2007 12:31 am • Permalink

  • 4

    There is a new online rails app from the people who do PingMe - simple, without a timer, but might be enough to track the hours if you have another way of timing: http://gotagtime.com

    by Steve Murphy @ 18/10/2007 3:11 am • Permalink

  • 5

    Timelog is cool. http://www.mediaatelier.com/TimeLog/

    by pete @ 18/10/2007 7:53 am • Permalink

  • 6

    SlimTimer is one that normally comes recommended

    by Lyle @ 18/10/2007 8:43 am • Permalink

  • 7

    I find that if I have to record something in the moment, going old-school with pen and paper is usually the most straightforward thing. Works on- and off-line, is portable, cheap, efficient, and reliable. I found [this wiki page on C2](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LogBook) pretty inspiring for my logging needs. The biggest obstacle for me, though, no matter what system I try to use, is my own laziness, rather the materials I'm using.

    by Stephen Tudor @ 18/10/2007 1:17 pm • Permalink

  • 8

    How about Stone Design's Time Equals Money?

    by Alun J. Carr @ 18/10/2007 3:33 pm • Permalink

  • 9

    I have no recommendations myself, I try to get by using David Seah's Emergent Task Planner every day and some filling in of my calendar, this barely works. But, I am going to give SlimTimer a try, looks nice. Cheers.

    by Brandon Bowman @ 18/10/2007 4:44 pm • Permalink

  • 10

    I'm quite a fan of http://www.loggr.co.uk It's as simple as it gets and genuinely useful for me.

    by Josh @ 18/10/2007 9:15 pm • Permalink

  • 11

    Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. Looks like there's some good possibilities in there, I'll check them out.

    by bsag @ 18/10/2007 10:39 pm • Permalink

  • 12

    There's a feature on FreelanceSwitch about much the same thing which also might help, BSAG.

    by Lyle @ 19/10/2007 9:48 am • Permalink

  • 13

    http://www.stuntsoftware.com/OnTheJob/

    by Tim Case @ 22/10/2007 3:46 pm • Permalink

  • 14

    Just to update everyone, after playing with a few of the applications mentioned, I decided to go for Stone Design's Time Equals Money. It's odd I didn't think of it for myself, because I do actually own the whole Stone suite (which is excellent). There are so many little gems of applications alongside the main ones (Create and Imaginator) that it's easy to overlook the smaller ones. Anyway, it isn't _exactly_ what I want, but it's pretty close. It's simple to enter data, you can export as CSV easily, and it does nice text format reports. Thanks for all the suggestions -- saved me quite a bit of time!

    by bsag @ 24/10/2007 6:46 pm • Permalink

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