Home

yourTime

Your tool to track your time

The Story Behind

As I'm doing IT stuff for living, quite often I end up needing a lightweight to use yet detailed way of tracking my time "expenses". That is needed to provide a summary bi-weekly time report for my current employer (all time "expenses" are to be grouped by the project and only totals for hours per day per project are needed). That is also needed to provide per task effort actuals for many projects' clients (all time "expenses" are grouped per project and then per task in that case and totals per task are provided). Also that is needed to collect statistics for myself on how much time do I spend on different types of activities, how hight is the quality of my working time, what is the ratio between the time spent on meetings and the time spent on delivery. In the latter case I need the most detailed way of tracking my time (i.e. up to having each "coffee break" listed there), while for the first two such information should not be visible.

I've tried several Windows and Linux based tools for time tracking, but none of those were at the same time cheap to use (needed effort wise) and at the same time provided required detalization and matching my reporting needs. Besides that, given the fact that recently I've been using Linux terminal more often then anything else (I'm writing this text in vim in a terminal on my Nokia N900 while walking to the office), I need an efficient command line tool to track my time. Also none of the solutions I've managed to find, provided an option to track my time using different devices (e.g. my phone, PC at work and a notebook) with automatic synchronization of the data between them in order to provide summary reports. I've tried to concentrat all this in the Mission Statement document.

The best approch is to reuse, but in this case I found no real candidates and thus have started a new project called yourTime. You can track your time using this tool (not atm the time I write this yet, but in near future - for sure).

It's a bit of a learning project for me as I've never done a from-the-scratch development on Linux, especially using autotools and aiming for a good portability and having proper i18n/l10n on-board. Thus, if you have some good advices/suggestions - I will be glad to hear those.

Oh, forgot to mention - I'm trying to use some sort of scrum-like approach for this project so Issues section of github.com is (to be) used a lot.

-- Serge.