software-recommendation
I have to do three or four jobs a day, and each has several parts. I want a time tracker tool to help me know how much time I've spent on each part and each job overall.
I've found some like gnotime and hamster.
What application do you recommend for such a case?
Hamster doesn't automatically track your actions, but it can be set to remind you every few minutes, which I actually find more useful. You can ask yourself every n minutes "am I still doing what I was planning to do?", "should I stop now?", "why am I not doing what I planned to be doing?" Then you can change course right away, rather than at the end of the day finding you spent three hours on askubuntu. :-)
Ultimately I want to develop more mindfulness of where I'm using my time, and these questions help.
Best Answer
Hamster
Main app:
hamster-appletAppindicator:
hamster-indicatorI've grown fond of Hamster, and used it for tracking how long I worked on a Summer of Code project. It's added to your indicator menus (or systray). When you want to start/stop/change tasks, just hit Super+H and type what you are doing.
It makes some pretty nice statistics for you that can be exported as HTML, for sending to others. You can categorize parts of a job into groups to keep track of what exactly you're doing at the time.
Each task is labelled as [task]@[job]. For example, you could have dev@project, doc@project, etc. Hamster will do some auto-completion on these as well so most of the time you only need to type a few characters. Tags can be added to tasks as well for further categorization.