I made this because I needed to track how much I work and on what. Timeretain allows you to track time using a fast, private feed of time cards. It displays your stats next to it, and you can filter to zoom in on a description or tag. You can always export what's in view.
It's different from other time trackers because it's powerful and minimalist. Here's how I use it.
I need to hold myself accountable. I want to know how much I've worked in a week, and Timeretain immediately shows that — no need to create extensive 'reports'. Next, a log of what I did is useful for standup. I can get that from my feed, which loads quickly. Finally, I have to track time for specific topics. With Timeretain, I can add tags on the fly — it doesn't require me to create and manage 'projects'.
I would love to hear your feedback. There's an instant demo on the landing page; you don't have to share personal details to test.
Just some food for thought. Good luck with the launch :)
It's just a button that adds a tag with a date to a JSON file stored in a simple file. Adding an entry takes less than 5 seconds because it autocompletes from existing tags.
But a picture is worth a thousand words: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/47354384/214017255... imgur: https://imgur.com/Z62qpIS
It's not public yet but I can make this plugin public if requested :)
https://easyorgmode.com/blog/clocking-using-org-mode-and-eas...
Basically the tool I'm imagining would ping me (in the asynchronous email sense, so not actively disturb me) at random intervals with the question "what were you just doing?"
The basic problem is that self-reporting is not very reliable. I don't have the study at hand, but it is fairly noise and consistently biased in favour of some types of tasks and against others. I believe work sampling could be more accurate, but I have yet to see someone develop that tool.
Also, the best tool I’ve found for accountability is to try and predict what you will spend time on before hand. So I have one calendar for my plan that I make first thing in the morning and another for what actually happened.
I built a tool to extract the calendar data (mentioned in abother comment, don't want to spam). I'd really appriciate any feedback you have :)
Why?
Maybe burnout is the wrong word?
In those cases, to hold myself accountable, I have to go back to the app, stop the current task, edit the time it stopped at, add a new entry for the distraction, then add yet another new entry to get back to work.
It logs open applications, documents, meetings, calendar events and recently even iPhone apps. You can then, manually or automatically, create time-blocks from this data.
I usually use it at the end of the day, but I once was able to recreate a rough timesheet for the last three months in 10 minutes.
I thought about making a google chat (or some other chat) bot message me every few hours and basically ask what I'm doing. That combined with some fancy logic like detecting when I'm not home/sleep/etc, could probably come up with a good personal timeline.
Typing the command (or clicking a shortcut) are a bit of extra work, but I have been logging my working hours for over half a decade already and it's not a huge change to log everything else. It also means being mindful of what you are supposed to be doing at any given time which I find to be useful in practice.
- Loads super fast (nice), I actually was puzzled by how fast it showed up
- I thought the 'totally not a fake person' was funny in a way, but then I realized that it slightly soured the overall impression a bit; which brings me to:
- I clicked away before trying the tool, because I've tried hundreds of similar services before, and probably half if not two thirds of them have completely disappeared overnight. They were also created by an indie maker who failed/struggled to monetize or lost interest, and my data and habits were caught up in a broken tool. So...
Some suggestions I could think of:
While it can be honest and transparent to play up the "hey I made this myself over a couple of weekends" indie maker vibe (I do the same thing), it really depends on the tool you're pushing, I'd argue. If I should switch to this tool as a time tracking tool, I want reliability, I want uptime, I want to be able (and try) to export my data to move on to another tool if necessary, I want to know that this tool will be as reliable as a hammer or screwdriver I'm buying at the hardware store. If this looks or feels like "a fun" experiment, then I'm out, because my work is not allowing me to play around too much with those.
I think you can win long-term users by making sure they can really trust to get their data out again (like you do with the Excel export at the bottom, but I only saw that on second glance when I started writing this here), but also if you decide to shut it down one lonely evening. If there's even a small chance I log on one random Monday, and I am confronted with an unpaid V-Server or DigitalOcean droplet warning thing, then I am not even going to give it a try. This tool doesn't have anyone on the payroll, your motivation to keep it alive is potentially very, very slim. That's what I'm worried about, even if I am totally wrong.
It's not easy to solve "trust" for a "weekend project by one person", but it's also not impossible to do so. Others go open-source (which I don't necessarily recommend) to be clear on "if I fold, you at least have the sources to continue using it", some may prefer an automated data backup (upload a copy to an FTP, or S3, or by e-mail, daily) — whatever, I am not a pro on solutions here, I am however good at worrying :)
Think of the risk assessment potential new users have to go through. Make sure you take care of the most prominent issues on that route and then think about the rest, like pricing, website, how 'transparent' or not you'd like to be.
If you'd just thrown up a great API that let us train GPT-like models or Dall-E type renderings for next-to-nothing, then you could have a literal middle finger as the only image on that page and people would sign up like crazy.
If you're planning to launch a tool that has thousands of similar competitors, and they're mostly competing by reliability, pricing and time-in-the-market — it may be smart to focus on the user journey (and persona you're expecting to convert) a bit more.
Hope that helps!
A periodical automated e-mail export makes a lot of sense and seems like the most inclusive of options. Again, many thanks for thinking along.
Edit: and thanks for noticing the loading speed! I’ve really focused on this. So many web apps are bloated nowadays. Timeretain is about 165KB g-zipped. Still on the heavy side, but it’ll do for now.
I am an avid user of standardnotes.com so I wrote myself an editor to do the time tracking: https://github.com/thomaseizinger/sn-timesheet-editor
This gives me sync across my devices for free and the data format is just CSV so I can easily paste it into a spreadsheet app and do the end of month accounting.
https://github.com/coffeecoding/EazyTime
Would love to hear feedback on the concept/design because I already know the code is utter junk (I was just playing around with Flutter for the first time).
Maybe I should pick it up again hmmm...
made me laugh.
