2 posts tagged “autoit”
Where does all the time go? I know I'm dong stuff, but what did I do? It doesn't matter whether I'm busy or bored, in the zone or in a funk, when it comes time to tally up hours at my day job or to invoice my consulting clients, I quickly realize that I'm not completely certain how much time I spent on the various things I've been doing recently.
So I thought to myself, at least for the portion of time that I spend on a computer (which for me is a LOT), I ought to be able to keep better track of what I'm doing. But I'm not going to make myself open some fancy program, click a bunch of buttons and type a description of everything I'm doing each time I switch from one task to another. My work patterns are too dynamic for that, and I'm naturally averse to adding that kind of overhead to what I do. I need something more automatic.
My computer already knows what I'm doing, I just need a way for it to keep track and tell me about it. I need to spy on myself! So I wrote this simple script to do just that. Presenting winTrails (source code, .exe ). Every sixty seconds, winTrails logs the active window's title and program name to a file, stamping each record with the current date and time, like this:
Sat 2007/07/14 06:23 explorer.exe C:\misc
Sat 2007/07/14 06:24 explorer.exe C:\misc
Sat 2007/07/14 06:25 Thunderbird.exe Inbox
Sat 2007/07/14 06:26 Thunderbird.exe Compose: Re: question
The log file records are tab-delimited, so they can easily be imported into a spreadsheet where they can be sorted, summarized, sliced and diced. In the future I'll post some other scripts that I use to quickly summarize recent activity.
The great thing about logging both the program name and the window title is that I can look at the data at two levels:
- a general overview by program -- for example, I spent 47 minutes processing email in Thunderbird and 32 minutes doing system work in puTTY
- more specific tasks by title -- the time spent in Thunderbird included 4 minutes reading a client's question and 7 minutes composing a reply
It's not perfect, of course. The script doesn't know when I stop to take a phone call, or if I walk away from the computer and leave a window open, it will look like I was running that program the whole time I was away. I usually use the 'lock workstation' feature though, and winTrails doesn't log anything if no window is active. A screen saver on a short delay would have a similar effect.
One of the benefits of tracking time this way is that I can start to hold myself more accountable for the time I spend. If I look back at one day's log and realize that I spent way too much time on random web surfing, maybe the next day I'll try to be a little more focused. If I'm successful, it will show up in the log and I'll feel good about it.
How do you keep track of your time? Leave a comment and share your experiences and tips.
I've written a conversion program that translates HTML files in TiddlyWiki format to the XML data structure used by Tudumo. The current version supports titles, tags, and notes. Future versions may add support for dates and other options.
I wrote and tested it using data in MonkeyGTD 2.1 alpha r91, but in theory it should work with almost any version of TiddlyWiki.
tiddly2tudumo.exe -- compiled program
tiddly2tudumo.au3 -- source code (autoit3)
Enjoy. Comments/questions welcome.
