What I request:
An automatic tracker that, when activated, records ideally:
- PC on/off or active time
- Currently opened app
- Currently opened website
The resulting timeframes can be turned into (and grouped into) working units.
Why it would be useful?
Work on a project is often tied to the computer in general, specific apps or homepages. Just like the automatic "start/stop enter/leave workplace", an automatic recording of these things would make tracking a lot easier: One doesn't have to start tracking manually, but could create work units from the tracker logs.
An exemplary user story: I fire up my notebook and already I am absorbed by the first emails and forget to start time tracking. First I work for three hours in pyCharm on a programming project, then a customer calls and I have to review a report in Word. Since I'm in homeoffice, my kids distract me for one hour with some very important stuff. When I get back to the computer, I urgently need to finish the report and write another few emails and then rush off. At the end of the day, I wonder: What did I really do today? I lost track... BUT: Working hours didn't 😅! It logged 3:00 hours pyCharm, 2:31 h Word, 0:34 h AFK, another 1:03 h Word and 2:12 h Mailprogram. I simply assign these log entries to tasks and swuuush: Done 🙂
Sometimes, work days are just too dynamic to think about starting/stopping the time tracker. An automatic app tracker could facilitate the recap enormeously!
My current workaround:
I have activity watch set up - whenever I want to recap what I've done, I use its timeline. However it is not very comfortable to use and tedious to then manually create new entries for past days (change date, manually add time, select task, ...) in Working hours.
Further comments:
- I know that this probably isn't an easy thing to implement, especially since you have multiple platforms/OS and probably have the ambition to cater each feature for each of those. Yet I think the gain would be huge.
- activity watch is OpenSource, maybe it provides an API or some insights into an easy to achieve logging
- other time tracking apps, e.g. Clockify, come with this feature. However I'd hate to switch away from the timo-partl universe. I love Working hours and the other apps.
- maybe a low-hanging fruit would be an option to load time tracking entries from external time trackers. It should, however, allow to filter which entries will actually become working units or tag entries generated this way with a special tag, to allow for easy filtering/deletion.
WorkingHours version: 2.9.28.0 (and 2.9.30.0)
Operating system: Windows (and Android)
