My Ideal Time Tracker

February 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment

This post is about my search for the ideal time tracking tool.

In 1998, I graduated as an Electrical Engineer and started working for a small company. For the first year, I was very happy. Then things started to go wrong.

I used to get to the end of a day and hadn’t a clue how I’d spent the time. I remembered sitting down in the morning. I remembered lunch. The rest was a blur. I wasn’t getting anything done.

As you can imagine, my bosses weren’t happy with the endless missed deadlines. And I was really unhappy that I wasn’t meeting my goals. So, being an engineer, I wanted to find a solution.

I thought that a good first step would be to find out how I was spending my time. How could I become more productive if I didn’t know what I was doing all day?

I spent more than 70% of my waking hours sat at a computer. Most things I wanted to achieve at work involved a computer. It seemed fairly logical, therefore, to look to the technology to help me figure out where my day was going.

And so in 2003 I began my search for a piece of software that would track my time. I had two requirements. I wanted it to:

1. Track my time automatically.

Many programs used a manual timer. You’d select the project you were working on, then click a start button. When you finished, you had to remember to stop the timer. It was distracting and fiddly. Not to mention a bit silly. Surely the computer could work out how long I’d spent on a task?

2. Tell me how long I’d spent on any one project.

I didn’t care how long Photoshop or Firefox was open for. I didn’t want to know how long I spent using an application. I wanted to know how long I spent working on a project.

So what did I find? Nothing. Nil. Nada. Most solutions I found were based on timers, therefore violating requirement 1. I did find a couple of programs that cleared hurdle 1, but came a cropper on 2. I kept on searching, convinced that there must be something out there that did what I wanted. Nothing fitted.

Years went by. I battled on. Every so often the “automatic time tracking” meme would resurface in my head and I’d do another scouring of the Internet. I tried yet more tools and encountered yet more frustration.

Fast forward to 2008. I became a freelancer. Knowing where my time went was more important to me than ever before. I’d last searched in 2006 and since then a lot had changed. The Internet had grown exponentially. I’d also defected to the Mac. This time, I was positive I’d come across what I’d been searching for.

Yet again I came up empty handed. This was getting ridiculous. The idea that I could actually make my own time tracker had occurred to me, but my self-esteem was on the floor. I’d never seen myself as a “proper” programmer. I was an “amateur hacker with pretensions”. I just wasn’t good enough.

Then something changed. In September 2008 I joined a local Open Source software project – the Glasgow Green Map. I submitted some code that I’d hacked on for a few days. It was messy and I didn’t understand what I was doing, but people seemed to really like it. I started to question my feelings of programmer inadequacy. “Maybe I can do it after all”, I thought.

One thing led to another and so now, in February 2009, I’ve decided to go for it and throw my hat into the Micro-ISV ring. I’ve thought a lot about how I’d implement a timer tracker for the Mac that I’d actually pay to use, and I think it’s achievable.

I’m aiming to have something out in beta by the end of 2009. Something tells me it’s going to be a lot of hard work, but I also think I’m going to have, as the comedians Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer would say “an awful lot of fun”*. Wish me luck.

* Technically, Vic and Bob never said this. It’s actually from Tom Fun and his friend Derek – 2 fictional comedy characters created by Vic and Bob in their legendary series “Bang Bang, It’s Reeves and Mortimer“.

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