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GTimeLog
--------
GTimeLog is a graphical (Gtk+) application for keeping track of time. Here's
how it works: every day, when you arrive to work, start up gtimelog and type
"arrived". Then start doing some activity (e.g. reading mail, or working on
a task). Whenever you stop doing an activity (either when you have finished
it, or when you switch to working on something else), type the name of the
activity into the gtimelog prompt. Try to use the same text if you make
several entries for an activity (history helps here -- just use the up and down
arrow keys). They key principle here is to name the activity after you've
stopped working on it, and not when you've started. Of course you can type
the activity name upfront, and just delay pressing the Enter key until you're
done.
There's also a Tasks pane that lists tasks found in ~/.gtimelog/tasks.txt.
You can click on those to save typing. Or you can specify a URL in
~/.gtimelog/gtimelogrc and download the task list from a wiki or wherever.
There are two broad categories of activities: ones that count as work (coding,
planning, writing proposals or reports, answering work-related email), and ones
that don't (browsing the web for fun, reading personal email, chatting with
a friend on the phone for two hours, going out for a lunch break). To indicate
which activities are not work related add two asterisks to the activity name:
lunch **
browsing slashdot **
napping on the couch **
If you want some activity (or non-activity) to be completely omitted from the
reports, use three asterisks:
break ***
Work activities can also include a category name, e.g.:
project1: fixing bug #1234
project1: refactoring tessts
project2: fixing buildbot
sysadmining: upgrading work laptop
GTimeLog displays all the things you've done today, and calculates the total
time you spent working, the total time you spent "slacking", and the sum total
for convenience. It also advises you how much time you still have to work today
to get 8 hours of work done, and how much time is left just to have spent a
workday at the office (the number of hours in a day is configurable in
~/.gtimelog/gtimelogrc). There are three basic views: one shows all the
activities in chronological order, with starting and ending times; another
groups all entries with the same title into one activity and just shows
the total duration; and a third one groups all entries from the same categories
into one line with the total duration.
At the end of the day you can send off a daily report by choosing File -> Daily
Report. A mail program (Mutt in a terminal, unless you have changed it in
~/.gtimelog/gtimelogrc) will be started with all the activities listed in it.
My Mutt configuration lets me edit the report before sending it.
If you forget to enter an activity, you can start your activity with a 24h
time ("09:30 morning meeting") or a minute-offset ("-10 morning meeting").
Note that the new activity must still be after the last entered event. The
time/offset will be removed from the description of the activity before it's
entered.
If you make a mistake and type in the wrong activity name, don't worry.
GTimeLog stores the time log in a simple plain text file
~/.gtimelog/timelog.txt. Every line contains a timestamp and the name of the
activity that was finished at the time. All other lines are ignored, so you
can add comments if you want to -- just make sure no comment begins with a
timestamp. You do not have to worry about GTimeLog overwriting your changes
-- GTimeLog always appends entries at the end of the file, and does not keep
the log file open all the time. You do have to worry about overwriting
changes made by GTimeLog with your editor -- make sure you do not enter any
activities in GTimeLog while you have timelog.txt open in a text editor.
If you want a more visual idea of how you spend your time you can export the
"Work/Slacking stats" to a spreadsheet and graph them. You get 4 values per
line: the date, how long after midnight you started work, and how long you
spent working and slacking that day, all times in fractional hours. Starting
from midnight makes it easy to read the graph scale as the time of day. Try
a bargraph with stacked values and both first row and column as labels.
You can change the configuration directory (by default, ~/.gtimelog) by
setting the environment variable $GTIMELOG_HOME to a non-empty string naming
the directory you want to use.
Future Plans
------------
Configuration dialog. The ability to browse through history (view daily and
weekly reports for past days and weeks).
Bugs
----
See http://bugs.launchpad.net/gtimelog/
Other Tools
-----------
These can be found in scripts/
timelog.py is an earlier, less powerful text-mode version of gtimelog. You
type in activity names, and timelog writes them down into timelog.txt with
timestamps prepended.
today.py can generate a daily report from timelog.txt. It does not group
activities with the same name, and it does not spawn a mail client.
You can also specify the date on the command line -- generating reports for
earlier days is not yet possible with GTimeLog.
sum.py can help you consolidate daily reports. It is designed to work as a
filter: it reads lines from the standard input, extracts durations from
those lines (formatted as "N hours, M min" at the end of the line, and
separated by at least two spaces from other text), sums them and prints the
total. If you use vim for editing daily reports, you can select a bunch of
lines and pipe them through sum.py.
difftime.py is a hacky interactive calculator that I used to generate daily
reports from timelog.txt before today.py and gtimelog.py could automate the
task. The biggest feature of difftime.py (it's raison d'etre if you will)
is the ability to calculate the duration between two timestamps.
Data Formats
------------
These tools were designed for easy interoperability. There are two data
formats: one is used for timelog.txt, another is used for daily reports.
They are both human and machine readable, easy to edit, easy to parse.
Timelog.txt is already described above. Here is a more formal grammar:
file ::= (entry|comment)*
entry ::= timestamp ":" space title newline
comment ::= anything* newline
title ::= anything*
timestamp is 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM' with a single space between the date and
time.
Daily reports look like this:
random text
random text
Entry title Duration
Entry title Duration
random text
Entry title Duration
Entry title Duration
random text
Formal grammar:
report ::= (entry|comment)*
entry ::= title space space duration newline
comment ::= anything* newline
title ::= anything*
duration ::= hours "," space minutes
| hours space minutes
| hours
| minutes
hours ::= number space "hour"
| number space "hours"
minutes ::= number space "min"
There is a convention that entries that include two asterisks in their titles
indicate slacking or pauses between work activities.
Task list is a text file, with one task per line. Empty lines and lines
starting with a '#' are ignored. Task names should consist of a group name
(project name, XP-style story, whatever), a colon, and a task name. Tasks will
be grouped. If there is no colon on a line, the task will be grouped under
"Other".
Author
------
Marius Gedminas
<marius@pov.lt>
Contributors
------------
Thom May
Dafydd Harries
Ignas Mikalajūnas
Gaute Amundsen
Chris Beaven
Harald Friessnegger
Rodrigo Daunoravicius
Laurynas Speičys
a few others (check bzr log)
Icon
----
The icons were drawn by my sister Živilė Gedminaitė
Web
---
http://mg.pov.lt/gtimelog
Mailing list
------------
gtimelog@googlegroups.com
http://groups.google.com/group/gtimelog
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