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The instant demo is a nice touch. Personally, what's stopping me from using an app like this is that I don't trust myself to not absentmindedly shift over to some distraction, or get interrupted by my wife and/or kids while I'm tracking some task.

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.

Hey, thanks for checking. I appreciate it! I built a “subtract” feature for this use case. Once you’ve stopped doing a task, you can subtract whatever minutes you felt distracted. You can enable this in settings, and set a default value. I use it to subtract 30 minutes from my day of work for lunch time.

Despite it's steep price and Mac-exclusivity, I've found https://timingapp.com to be invaluable.

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.

You should implement this as an Obsidian (https://obsidian.md) plugin, I think it'd get traction among the TFT crowd there most of whom use a daily note.

Good one! I've been thinking about possible integrations — thanks for sharing.

a vote for a nimbus integration

Hi, I created something similar for Obsidian, but a lot simpler.

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 :)

cool! taking a look...

The plugin is public now: https://github.com/Paul-Gd/obsidian-yattp

As I said, it's quite simple. It was designed to take very little time to track my activity. I tried other plugins/apps but I never managed to track anything more than a few days because it took too much time and I would always forgot.

Looks cool. I am an avid org-mode user which I also use for coding/writing/email, so probably not the target audience. Why no "pause" button?

Thanks! A pause button is on the list. I am still thinking about how to remind people to unpause or stop. I might build opt-in notifications for this.

Same here. org-mode is the best todo and time tracker system I've personally used. Nothing I've come across has been more pleasant and smooth. I always forget to use todos and time trackers over time. But not with org-mode.

This post summarizes a few ways you can track time using org-mode and particularly summarize your tracked time.

https://easyorgmode.com/blog/clocking-using-org-mode-and-eas...

I'm going to try this. It may be exactly what I've been looking for. The "subtract" feature is killer because, like another commenter here, I tend to get distracted and need to subtract from a time allocation, but other solutions make that harder than it should be.

Great to hear! I hope Timeretain will indeed be helpful to you :)

Ha, I just built something similar for myself over the winter holidays. It's just a Google Chat bot duct taped to Google Calendar with a bit of Apps Script, but seeing how I spend my days visually has been extremely motivating in adjusting my routine and habits. Best of luck to you.

This sounds pretty interesting to me, what exactly is the flow like?

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.

When you start doing something, you type `/do something`, when you are done, you type `/done` followed by an optional comment about what you did. Things are added to different calendars depending on what `something` is. I already have a separate database with sleep information, I am going to export it into the same google calendars when I get the chance.

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.

I would like to see more of these tools except based on work sampling instead of trusting the user to accurately report a full account of their time.

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.

A recent comment here on HN pointed me to https://timesnapper.com/. It takes screenshots across your entire workday and you can go through a video of what you were doing. Total gamechanger for me, I absolutely love it.

It also has 'Automatically popup New Flag dialog' which seems to be similar to what you want.

Huh, thanks! That looks like an easy shellscript to hack together. I might give it a shot!

I recently started contracting and needed to track my hours for that. Tried a few services but none did quite what I wanted.

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.

I use my calendar for this. The event name is my notes for what I did. I find I forget to hit start (or stop) at the exact perfect time with these tools so they’re always only showing a partial view. With the calendar, I can go through and add in events for what I did in the morning or the day before.

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 do something similar. Hard to beat Apple Calendar’s UI, plus it’s syncable and shareable by default. I use the event title for the project I’m working on and the notes field for details. Have toyed with the idea of making an exporter to a spreadsheet format, but haven’t needed it badly enough yet. I like your idea of a separate planning calendar.

I've built https://billabl.co with this idea in mind. It's early days and I'm just hacking on it as a side project. I use the event title for the project name, or sometimes the client name (depending on how busy I am with that client, or how detailed my invoices need to be). Sometimes I'll create a separate calendar just for one client. So far it connects to Google calendars only.

I completely agree, the start stop thing never worked for me. I also didn't like the idea of those apps that track what applications you have open, seemed really creepy.

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 :)

I made something very similar a while ago but thought it wouldn't be interesting to users because you need to do too many inputs, costing extra time.

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...

> "Jim James - Totally not a fake person"

made me laugh.

I am not saying that everything should be free but once this has a price tag I can't see why I would pay for this when I can use Toggl for free. Toggl is more mature thus more feature rich and stable, it would be a hard switch.

Hey, I appreciate the honest feedback. You're right that competing tools are very feature complete. That is one of the reasons I built Timeretain: I needed something much more minimalist. Having said that, I do get your point. Is there anything in particular that you're currently missing?

You for sure hit the minimalist aspect and it's a good looking app! I am not sure if you're mean in general time tracking or with Timeretain. In general time tracking no but I use time tracking for personal use and not for tracking paid projects. For me having a mobile app is a big deal since I use it track personal habits etc but thats probably more of niche use. My advice would be keep you focusing on your minimalist approach since you saw the need for that but I would investigate toggls business model and see if you can match that while catering to a different subset of users. Good luck!

> I needed to track how much I work and on what.

Why?

My day job is fun. If I don't keep myself accountable, I end up working 50-60 hour weeks and burn myself out. I needed something that would show me "in bold" that I've already done 40 hours on a Wednesday. Initially, this lived in an Excel sheet, but that became unmaintainable quickly.

Maybe I'm groggy (just woke up from a nap) but how is a job that's so fun you need help stopping yourself from working 50-60 hours going to result in burnout? Wouldn't the burnout be a self regulating mechanism?

Maybe burnout is the wrong word?

That is a fair point, although I've heard many times in my circle about people who "were great" and then crashed. In general, I needed to force leisure time on myself. Timeretain helps me with this.

> Burnout is: exhaustion, inefficacy and depersonalization

This tool is focusing a lot on the first and maybe the second but it’s that third one that’s the hardest to catch.

I like recording how I'm spending my time, so that later when it feels like the day got away from me, I can see why. Ideally, I can make adjustments that help unlock longer focus periods while still keeping family, coworkers, bosses, and other stakeholders in my life happy.

I love the GAN testimonial :D

I swear by Wakatime..

Things that come to mind when clicking through:

- 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!

Thanks a million for this comment! It has made me realize that I have to go the extra mile to win user trust.

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.

super cool

A bit unrelated, but I misread the business name repeatedly. I read it as "Time Train" and it took concerted effort to see it as "Time Retain."

Just some food for thought. Good luck with the launch :)

Ha, that's interesting. I'll keep this in mind. If I keep this name, I might change the logo to improve legibility. Thanks for sharing.

I had the same issue. I think changing the logo to improve legibility is a good idea.

Yep, same thing happened in my brain. Maybe Timer Train instead? And play with the double meaning of train as in practice and get better, and train as in when all the cars are hooked up and going in the same direction on the same track you can move a heck of a lot of freight and people.

Oh wow... it was reading this comment that made me realise it's not called 'TimeTrain'.

I read it as Time Train as well until I read your comment! Time Retain is a poorer name, in my opinion.

After "Time Train", I saw "Timer Tain" and couldn't figure out what a "Tain" or an "eTain" was. I even saw "Tim Ere Tain" before I saw "Time Retain". Maybe just keep that "R" capitalized everywhere.

Show HN: Timeretain – Track, visualize, and export your hours