Ask HN: How do you track time?

In a previous job, I sometimes had to context switch often and on short notice. I'd invariably lose track of my time allocations. I needed to keep track of billable hours across often 3,5,7, or more projects and tasks (and categorizations of work type) at a time, and manual recording was just not cutting it.

This was a Windows shop, and I found, of all things, a little AutoHotKey script whose interface was, in the main, exactly what I was looking for.

At a predetermined interval, it would pop up a dialog asking whether I was still doing the same thing. The dialog was on top but did NOT steal focus. If I was in the middle of typing something, I could continue uninterrupted.

If I was doing the same thing, one click to dismiss. If not, I could select one of an active set of items from a dropdown list, and time recording would start logging that item instead. If I was doing something new, I could type it into the textbox at the head of the dropdown list, and it would become the identifier for the new record. No additional dialog or multiple step set up: Just type it in and go.

Also, if I remembered to do so, upon context switch I could click its icon in the taskbar to get the same prompt immediately.

Data was saved as simple CSV or similar. I could suck it into whatever I wanted and sum and reconcile it there. Typically, I'd do this in Excel, and it would go quite quickly.

I set the time interval to 5 minutes; that was enough resolution for my billing. It sounds annoying, perhaps, but I quickly got used to it and responded mostly automatically.

There were two problems:

1) It was buggy. A subset of records would have their start and/or stop times recorded incorrectly. I could fix them manually, when summing and reconciling, but grumble.

2) I would have liked a further interface to tweak records on the fly, for when I recorded the wrong item, got called away from my desk, or whatever, while the program continued to measure my time under the last/wrong event.

I never got around to learning AutoHotKey's scripting and improving it.

That job is over with, now. And perhaps that is in a way a comment on the need for such time recording. If your time, ore measure of same, is becoming that fragmented, you may want to consider an environment that is less fragmented.

For linux ktimetracker which can automatically time a task only when it's in a certain desktop. Of course my main reason for using it was to keep myself from wasting too much time on hn and other websites. :)