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Ask HN: Time tracking

Hi all, I'm building a time tracking application. I'm curious about your personal time tracking preferences:

Do you track your time mostly after the fact?

Not at all?

Track time mostly throughout the day (stopwatch)?

I ask, because we have a Stopwatch mode in our application and a manual time entry mode and I'm curious which one will be most popular and to focus our efforts.

Thanks...

( 8 comments | 6 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: Time tracking by cheekysod on Sunday February 01, 2009 @06:49PM (#461611)
I use TaskTrack:

http://www.bushsoftware.com/TaskTrack/TaskTrack.html

no setup required, and it tracks exactly how long you spend on each document during the day; so all you have to do is group the documents into tasks and you have the total time spent.

its actually made this stuff a heap easier than it was for me, I never used to bother until the end of the week, now I still dont, but the numbers are right :)

Re:Ask HN: Time tracking by ctingom on Sunday February 01, 2009 @07:15PM (#461636)
Sounds like a nice app, sort of like RescueTime.
Re:Ask HN: Time tracking by scorpioxy on Sunday February 01, 2009 @12:33PM (#461044)
Echoing on what @mkuhn said, i would normally like to use a stopwatch mode when i would be doing something for a long period of time. For example, half a day's work for project A and then switching to project B or something like that.

Otherwise, i tend to just use time slots and fill then in at the end of the day in a spreadsheet. Mechanical and tedious, but it does the job. Of course, it doesn't really help unless i remember to fill the information in.

Re:Ask HN: Time tracking by mkuhn on Sunday February 01, 2009 @06:11AM (#460789)
For me its something I normaly do at the end of my workday. Fiddling with a stopwatch mode throughout the whole day would be somewhat to much effort for me.
Re:Ask HN: Time tracking by ctingom on Sunday February 01, 2009 @07:19PM (#461641)
Thanks for the feedback!
Re:Ask HN: Time tracking by brusqe on Sunday February 01, 2009 @05:03AM (#460752)
Presumably this is for http://www.minuteglass.com/? If you are after any significantly large sample data to base some usability/design decisions on, I'd recommend Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Re:Ask HN: Time tracking by ctingom on Sunday February 01, 2009 @05:04PM (#461464)
Yes, I'm the designer behind Minuteglass and I'll think about using the Mechanical Turk to get some feedback.

Thanks.

Re:Ask HN: Time tracking by chris11 on Sunday February 01, 2009 @01:09PM (#461095)
I've just been keeping a time log for the past few days. I'm not sure how long I will keep doing it, but right now it works so I just my cell phone for the time, and a piece of paper to write down what I'm doing throughout the day.