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Comment by corobo | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person that hates "Start or stop timer with a single click"? I don't want timers. I never remember to start them, I never remember to stop them.

What I do instead is write down in my little (edit: physical, pen and paper) notepad when I start a task then note when I stop it, later updating the timesheet with the difference. I just want to be able to enter a hours:minutes value for each task when I get a moment, does this app do that? It's literally the only reason I still use Basecamp Classic (v1)

Another pet peeve: If I click "Features" in the header or footer I want more information, I do not want to be scrolled back to the thing I already read.

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I use toggl[1] exactly this way. Check it out.

[1]: http://toggl.com/

I wrote a python script that hooks into a git pull, since the first thing I always do is start the morning with a pull. Then I wrote a script that looks for a commit with a specific message to my personal repo, since I always end the day committing to my personal repo (I squash into master). The commit usually has the ticket number in it, so the script logs the time in our system. The next git pull will start the timer fresh.

Have you looked at wakatime?

Unfortunately my company wrote it's own ticket tracking and time tracking software. But the script only took a few min to write, so no biggy.

What's the difference between remembering to click a button and remembering to write something down?

Quickly jotting a time on a piece of paper doesn't seem to drop be out of the zone/flow/etc whereas switching to some time app does. I always have the notepad and pen next to the mouse ready to go to write notes about what I'm doing anyway, may as well just timestamp the task changes. Also the notepad is always there in physical space, I haven't accidentally closed the tab it was in and it's never hidden behind a terminal window.

Not really sure, I think it's having a different input method as opposed to the mouse and keyboard I'm using to do whatever task I'm doing so it doesn't get in the way.

It's always been one of those features that sounds good in your head, but never works in practice, except when you're playing chess. They NEVER get used, and if by chance they do, they are so wildly inaccurate, because you've forgotten about it in the meantime.

Try https://wakatime.com which I built to solve this exact problem... it automatically tracks your time, no more manual timers!

I don't think I'm your target market sorry. That sounds worse than the timer buttons. I'd expect to get back to a timesheet that hadn't realised I left the editor open overnight[1] and it tries to bill for 12 hours work while I was asleep.

Good for the bank, not great for repeat business!

[1] This is an assumption on how it works because I couldn't find that on your site. Your docs links also goes to API documentation - is that intentional?

Edit: Found the FAQ in the footer (this should be way more prominent!) that explains how it works, unfortunately it wouldn't track the time I'm working on syadmin stuff and other non-code tasks which would mean I'd need to use my notepad method and this.. Too much extra work, I'm only tracking time in the first place because otherwise we don't get paid. Man I hate tracking time.

Thanks for the feedback, the FAQ is in the footer to prevent distractions and the DOCS link hopefully conveys that it's for devs. I'll try putting the FAQ next to DOCS for a while.

I've found that the vim plugin captures sysadmin time well enough, even if just to jog my memory later on.

Just for anyone not wanting to look at the FAQ, it only tracks while actively editing a file. And in my experience (I've used wakatime since early days, although not lately). even when you're off researching stuff online in the midst of a programming session, the charts makes those times easily "findable" for the proper time tracking when actually tracking the data.

For sysadmin I guess that doesn't matter, but I wanted to mention it anyway.

I've been using wt for the last 30 days or so, and it's working really well.

Are you considering an on-prem version?

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