I believe that as a professional I must be accountable for how I spend my working hours. I should be able to answer questions like "How long did feature X take to implement?", "Why did Y take so long?" and "What have you been working on for the last week?". My memory is not always up to this challenge.
To solve this I wrote a very simple 'proactive time tracker'. It regularly pops up a message box to ask "What have you been doing for the last X minutes?" and logs the answers. This allows me to automatically record what I got up to in a day.
Another project trying to solve this same problem is: TimeSnapper
It takes regular snapshots of your screen (at configurable interval and resolution) and allows you to later play this back as a movie :) or jump to any point in time.
I reckon it's a nice solution. I am looking forward to replaying my week :)
1 comment:
Hi Nigel!
Thanks for blogging about TimeSnapper! It's support like yours that keeps us motivated :)
You should check out the new version which has multi monitor support and archiving features built in. Also you can better see how active you were in front of the computer with the new TimeBar in the Day browser. We're pretty happy with it.
Next release will contain some additional feature like, statistics (what programs did I use today and for how long) and a really simple way to set flags with comments throughout the day.
Other features like screenshot filtering will also be available (doesn't take snapshots if you have minesweeper open... if you choose so :)
The mission is to make timesheets as easy as possible :)
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