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Best way to track the time you spend on each project

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mouser:
I think this has come up before, but i couldn't find a good thread on it.

I want to do a more orderly job of tracking how much time i spend on each project.


* I'm not really interested in a program that detects which programs i have open and assigns specific programs to specific projects
* I am interested in something that lets me really easily manually switch between projects
* Something that gives me good visual feedback about what project i am working on.
* Makes reports suitable for text copy and paste
Any suggestions?

mouser:
To help clarify what i'm interested in.. im more interested in properly billing people for time, rather than in figuring out what kinds of things i do on the computer.

OGroeger:
I used Working Time Tracker. It is very flexible in reports and exports. I used the export to a csv file, than loaded the csv file into excel and from there using a Macro and "SendKeys" i moved the data to Navision, which was the company time tracker. :-)

Unfortunatly, the development seems to be dead.

tranglos:
To help clarify what i'm interested in.. im more interested in properly billing people for time, rather than in figuring out what kinds of things i do on the computer.
-mouser (November 11, 2007, 11:00 AM)
--- End quote ---

For this purpose TimeSnapper (www.timesnapper.com) is apparently suitable - at least this was the design of the program and many people use it that way. Its basic function is periodically taking screenshots, which you can then replay as a kind of a slide-show to track what you were doing all day (or all year). This is supplemented with powerful reports and timesheets, so you can find out exactly how much time you spent working in a specific application. It will even run the screenshots through OCR, so you can extract text.

Overall, it's a very well-written utility, and actively developed. The support is instantaneous, pretty much like yours, mouser :) I waited all of two minutes for a reply. Two things to watch out for:

1) it's a .Net application, take it or leave it;

2) It uses online activation. You get two license codes for installation on two machines. After that, if for example you ditch one computer and get another, you need to email them for a new set of codes. That was my support request they responded to within 2 minutes, but I must say I was already non-plussed at having to email them and _ask_ to regain use of software I'd paid for. Got to say also though that the author is a really sweet guy, and though I had a rant ready to be written, after the quick and corteous response from him I wasn't going to give him any hard time about the licensing scheme - though it is a bad idea.

I don't think TimeSnapper will do any project management for you, but it will automate tracking the time spent very well.

.marek

mouser:
TimeSnapper is indeed a nice looking program.. i keep wondering if i should make a similar simpler program out of my screenshot captor code.

However, i think that would be more appropriate for someone wanting to see a complete look at how they spend all their time.. I'm more interested in something where i can quickly click on tray to say "i'm working on project X now" and then "i've stopped working on project X" etc.

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