Time Tracking

Overview

Starting in 2021, I began to track my productivity. I was heavily influenced by Devine Lu Linvega’s Horaire tool, but wanted to set up my own categories and tracking methodology.

Initially, tracking was simply a way to find out exactly how much time I was actually spending on focused work—I know how easy it can be to feel like you’re working but be between tasks. This space between work and play actually occupied a lot of my time, logging was a great reminder that eventually this time would either have to be allocated to a category (in which case I needed to have something to show for it) or it wouldn’t be counted as productive work at all.

JRNL is a lightweight program written in Python which allows me to add work sessions to a database and to review the total time I've spent across various categories of work.

Features

After the script is run, the user is prompted to run [A]dd or [S]ummary mode. Add mode allows the user to input a Category and Duration for multiple work sessions. Add mode is finished once the user exits by entering e on the keyboard. Each work session is stored in a .json file for later use.

Summary mode prints a summary of the totals in the .json, from longest duration to shortest. It also includes a grand total.

Code

I’ve made the code publicly available on my GitHub: will-darwin/jrnl

Future Work

I would like to add a readme, make the GitHub repository more presentable, optimize the code and work on a more sophisticated summary page, but I have stopped work on this project for now.