A few years ago I was working on a long-ish project and was tracking my time for billing. I noticed that, every so often, I would total up time spent on this or that feature or behavior and wonder how in the world did that take so long?

So I wrote a small CLI tool that would let me write a short note and append it to a file. The note would be time-stamped, and the file name (or something) would reflect my current working directory.

I forget exactly the details (I should go find this code if I can) but the idea was to be able to record quick observations about what I was doing so that later I could go back and get a more nuanced picture than basic time-tracking might offer.

For example, I could do this:

     james:~/dev/BigProject$@ gem docs for stupid-easy-attachment gem do not match reality

The '@' was the name of my note script.

I'd then have a record of my trouble getting some gem to work.

If nothing else it was therapeutic. Sometimes just writing something out spurred a useful idea, too.

My time-tracking tool (JotBot) did allow for adding notes to recorded time but being able to record quick thoughts with little interruption to my work flow was a big win.