@ Stephen:

Incidentally hamster now ships with a cli command for making things really friction-free. I alias it to hc (hamster-cli), and do things like this:

hc list
hc start ‘working on ticket-314’
hc start ‘working on ticket, forgot to enter start 5 mins ago’ -5
hc stop

pretty nice, and really nice stats graphs.

Before we were forced to use netsuite something horribly inferior, i used the hamster program found in the ubuntu repos. Terse, logged to sqlite3 for convenient python parsing and reporting. Very non-intrusive.

This is an interesting way of doing this. I always thought of work tracking as based around the action item, which usually grows cumbersome. This stream-of-(corporate-)consiouness workflow tracking seems to be much easier to fit in.

It would be pretty sweet to highlight a section of the calander on there and have the field populated with what was done over the selected time range. I guess I will have to look at an awk script for that.

And since the format puts time of the entry on a different line than the entry itself, tools like grep and find can’t be easily used for keyword searches.

Look up grep arguments -A and -B (‘after’ and ‘before’). They return the number of lines specified from the target line.

In this case, you’d grep -B 1 (timestamp) and you’d get returned your timestamp and the one line before it (for each instance, of course)

Also, on the physical pad thing: it’s something engineers do, and it’s damn useful to have it in hardcopy. After using it for a bit, you get to know what kind of information to store. While it may not suit your workflow, there are workflows where a physical notepad is superior to an electronic one. For me, though, it doesn’t matter what I use, I never make entries :)

@ Justyn:

I could make this a Google App Engine project, and hand off authentication to Google. :) The question is, whether or not people would be willing to trust me with their work tracking data.

@ Travis McCrea:

LOL! Yes, I’m the same way. Around the time it’s almost finished, I’m already starting to get bored with it.

Yeah well I wasn’t thinking highly twitter like, but the same basic “micro-blog” minimalist feel. Glad I could set you up in a fun new direction.

The thing about projects like these, I always find that I spend more time building a system to keep track of what I am working on, then actually spend on working on the stuff I am supposed to. Its like using all your money to buy a nice wallet. :P

@ Luke Maciak:
If you make something like this (public), that would really be cool. Just make sure it’s easy to submit something using curl/wget/etc so that it can be updated from the cli without opening another browser tab :D

@ Tino:

1. Record everything using a system of hidden cameras
2. Publish online
3. ???
4. Truman Show

@ Travis McCrea:

Sir, this is an excellent idea. I am now inspired to write an online version of this. I would like it to look less like twitter and more like personal timeline with no social aspects, and good search features.

@ Stefanie:

Actually it works fairly well under mono as well. :)

Hm, interesting idea. The app seems to be windows only?

After reading this I was thinking “logging parts of your life that honestly no-one really cares about, and wanting it timestamped”… “twitter”

Why not just build your own little “twitter” script on your site, then you can move around be anywhere on any computer, or even on the phone… and update your “worklog”.

I remembered this quick script from nettuts:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/twitter-emulation-using-mootools -12-and-php/