Show HN: Track time spent on activities that matter to you | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Track time spent on activities that matter to you

countthehours.app

25 points9_weslay14 comments

For me, if it need to manually tracked then I will absolutely forget or stop using it because too lazy. Unless you need to track for getting paid or something important.

The website looks clean though, good work!

If you only want to track what are you doing in your laptop or PC, I recommend activitywatch [1], it can detect when AFK and what app or web we open. I only run and forget it and check it later when I want to know what I'm doing this week/month. It's open source and I'm not affiliated with it, just a happy user.

[1] https://activitywatch.net/

It is a nice website, but I agree with you.

It reminds me of the thinking that a smart home is one that you can turn the lights on or off with a web app or smart assistant. In reality, the most pleasant implementations do something like use motion sensors or wifi/Bluetooth to avoid having to even open the app for the automations to kick in.

E.g.: detecting when no one is connected to the home wifi and locking the doors might be more useful than having the option to remotely do it since there is no need to remember.

Thank you very much for recommending Activitywatch; this seems like something that would be helpful to me. If it works, it will reduce the time I need for project reports etc.

I have been using this app for some months, it’s called "Simple Time Tracker" [0]. It has all kinds of visuals, stats, and it's FOSS. It also has backup capabilities. Highly recommend it for tracking time.

[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.razeeman.util.simpletime...

I had a similar tracker set up using orgmode eMacs.

The most difficult part was that I needed a device to input my data, which was bad for a lot of my offline activities.

Ideally I would want a watch that can predict what I am doing and automatically guess. It would then fill in all the details and just ask me to review at the end of each day.

Training can be done both supervised and unsupervised, ie for supervised you explicitly tell watch “I am now working out”, and it would learn. Unsupervised is at the end of day, watch segments activity into discrete activities then asks you whether it segmented correctly, and assign label to segmented activity.

If it is Apple Watch, you can additionally leverage more information by figuring which apps I have open on my phone or computer.

Thanks. Agree that that would be great. But I feel that the complexity and the unpredictability of that additional step outweighs its benefits. What if a user doesn't have an Apple watch? I am sure there are workarounds but the fact that that is even a question a user has to ask already reflects some additional complexity.

Yeah what I proposed is several phds worth of work, not thinking practically at all.

There are a few window tracking apps that will track and allocate your time. Phones have them too.

I discovered that while tracking the time is helpful and enlightening the big change for me, going from using my phone 4 hours a day to 80 minutes was when I messaged a group of others who would share their weekly stats.

Girls I know spend 7 hours a day on their phones. Weekly reports tell me this. There is no shame. No insults. Just silently sharing.

I used to think I was working hard until I began tracking my focused work time, excluding trivial tasks like emails. I was surprised to find I averaged only 40-50 hours a week. My goal is to maintain a consistent 60.

I created a web app with a stopwatch and a bar chart log. Start the stopwatch when working and pause for breaks.

Here's an example of how my friend, Sam, has been using the app: www.countthehours.app/u/samdarmali

Hope you guys find it helpful!

For what its worth I think the premise of a webapp-only time tracking application is flawed. Around 40% of my "focused work time" is done in places where an internet connection is not available. How am I supposed to track that time?

Even if your app works "offline" (IE, I have the page loaded in my mobile browser and it works even when device has no internet) having to open the web browser on my mobile device to track those tasks is a pain.

Similar to calendaring, recording audio-notes to self, task tracking, note taking, and health tracking, time tracking is something that I think needs a dedicated mobile application that works offline but can then sync to a webservice when it does have a connection.

It does not necessarily need all the same features, but you are making a lot of assumptions about how people get work done if the premise of your time tracking application is that it requires a desktop/laptop and an internet connection.

Have you considered that if your trackable focus time is mostly offline, you’re not the intended user?

My trackable focus time is not 'mostly offline', but thats besides the point.

And you are probably right, but thats like saying that if you are blind or deaf your not the intended user. More often then not people don't get to choose whether or not they have access to the internet. Its an accessibility issue. Excluding users for things that are outside of their control is not right.

I'm sorry but a) no it is not the same thing as being deaf or blind. A currently Internet-less person can at some point have Internet. In fact, it is probably the case that most people who don't have Internet at any particular moment, will have Internet at some later point. Deaf and blind people do not typically become able to hear or sighted suddenly. b) The idea that not specifically creating a solution for someone in a particular condition is the same as actively excluding them, as you seem to imply by your axiological "it's not right" judgment, is incorrect. By your logic, making any tool for anything at all, so long as it has any dependency whatsoever, excludes all people who don't have those prerequisites, which, again according to you, "is not right". This would mean that even a tool which worked offline "wouldn't be right" since it excluded people without computers, smartphones, etc.

Your points are well made and well articulated, but I nevertheless disagree. Of course access to the internet is not the same as deafness/blindness, but I never said it was. its similar in that is an accessibility issue.

There are obviously accommodations and functionalities that are unreasonable to implant when it comes to accommodating accessibility issues. But offline functionality is not one of them, not for time tracking.

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