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takpar
Asked: 2010-09-14 08:13:42 +0800 CST

Which Time Tracker application do you recommend?

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I have to do three or four jobs a day, and each has several parts. I want a time tracker tool to help me know how much time I've spent on each part and each job overall.

I've found some like gnotime and hamster.

What application do you recommend for such a case?

software-recommendation

23 Answers

  1. Hamster

    Main app: hamster-appletInstall hamster-applet

    Appindicator: hamster-indicatorInstall hamster-applet

    I've grown fond of Hamster, and used it for tracking how long I worked on a Summer of Code project. It's added to your indicator menus (or systray). When you want to start/stop/change tasks, just hit Super+H and type what you are doing.

    It makes some pretty nice statistics for you that can be exported as HTML, for sending to others. You can categorize parts of a job into groups to keep track of what exactly you're doing at the time.

    Each task is labelled as [task]@[job]. For example, you could have dev@project, doc@project, etc. Hamster will do some auto-completion on these as well so most of the time you only need to type a few characters. Tags can be added to tasks as well for further categorization.

    Screenshot of Project Hamster by Toms Bauģis Screenshot by Toms Bauģis

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  2. Have you tried toggl

    Its an online app but it has a native linux client

    toggl linux client

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  3. I use gtimelog.

    Well. I wrote gtimelog. So it works for me. YMMV. I'm not the best software maintainer, I'm afraid.

    gtimelog 0.8 screenshot

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  4. I recommend Emacs with Org-Mode, installed by default together with emacs. Here is a screenshot of a Org-Mode buffer:

    alt text

    Why Emacs + Org-Mode? to avoid context switch, keeping you in the flow state!!! Sounds a bit radical, right?, I know, but I realized that -- in practice!

    When I give Org-Mode a chance I completely abandoned my old way of work and started keep me more focus on what really matter (code). My old workflow was:

    • Stop code and go mark as done some items;
    • Switch to the opened browser, looking for the remember the milk opened TAB;
    • Check my TODO tasks for that day and check OUT done items;
    • go back to my editor;
    • finally, restart the work (may take some more minutes to deeply focus again).

    With Org-Mode, I just need to switch to the Org-Mode buffer, pressing Ctrl + x b, and mark items as DONE -- switching back to my previous buffer. No more browser (or external app) + editor.

    I also would like to suggest to adopt The Pomodoro Technique, a really simple technique to get the most out of time management. Its more simple then GTD and easy to use in Emacs + Org-Mode: Put a timer of 25 minutes in all your tasks and Org-Mode will alert you always a task end. Better then ever!

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  5. arbtt is an automatic rule based time tracker. It looks at the active window titles on your desktop and automatically logs the title. It can catagorize the titles based on how you configure it, and then it can report back stats.

    So it might report back how much time is spent on a webdomain, in vim, and on facebook so you can look at your productivity.

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  6. A good one that I have used in the past is Klok, an adobe air application. It works great for tracking all your different projects, and giving you charts and graphs to break down how you're spending your time. The free version only exports timesheets in MS Excel format -- they want you to buy the full version for html and xml export.

    Klock application

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  7. Hamster is rather nice if you want one that's got a panel applet. There is another one that is written in Java called jTimeSched. This one has been useful on a thumb drive because I can run it on Windows, Mac and Linux, provided the host computer has Java installed. (It is available here and is not in the repositories.)

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  8. I'm surprised ActivityWatch isn't mentioned in any of these threads. Found it after a lot of searching online.

    Repository link with install instructions

    It has exactly the features that I needed:

    1. completely local data (no account signup needed)
    2. application level time tracking (also website level time tracking if you install the browser extension)
    3. idle time detection
    4. categorization of applications into work/fun/etc.
    5. tracks activity from the background, instead of me having to consciously log tasks/events

    Would have probably bought it even if it was paid, but best part, it's completely open source! Plus, it's under active development, unlike other 2010 apps in this thread which are unmaintained 11 years later.

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  9. For all fans of Harvest (getharvest.com) i recommend simple gtk application:

    https://github.com/tkowalewski/harvest-gtk

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  10. Watson is an open source command-line tool for time tracking. The code is here on Github. It comes with an (optional) server-side backend called crick, which can collect the time tracking data of a team.

    After looking around for quite a bit and only finding no longer working / no longer maintained / convoluted / commercial time tracking software for Linux, I found watson and settled for it. It has well throught-through commands so I don't really mind that it's "only" a command-line tool.

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