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Comment by lojack | Hacker News Reader

Time tracking is one of those things that I see constantly being reinvented. Whether it's spreadsheets that get emailed, completely custom solutions, or one of the numerous services available, few of them actually provide anything new.

What I want is a product that tracks my time for me. WakaTime is probably the closest I've seen. If only it worked outside of my text editor and automatically submitted my timesheets for me. I'm supposed to submit timesheets weekly, I probably do it closer to monthly (and I know I'm not the only one). I have enough trouble remembering what I did yesterday, let alone last month.

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> Time tracking is one of those things that I see constantly being reinvented. Whether it's spreadsheets that get emailed, completely custom solutions, or one of the numerous services available, few of them actually provide anything new.

I think that's because nobody provides enough hooks in enough different places to make something work for everyone. I'd call it the SAP problem. First you spend $3mm buying it and then you spend another $20mm customizing it.

Once the assumptions about how something will work are baked in, it's very difficult to change the database schema without breaking everything, and writing a translation layer on top of it is probably more work that it's worth.

A truly universal time tracking app would take a few years and a few million to develop properly so that it can be extended and changed and customized and by the time you've supported a million different use-cases it would have been easier for a dozen different people to write their own.

I would argue it's because of the confluence of a few factors:

* It's a problem lots of programmers have (programmers always solve problems they themselves have first) * It's a problem that seems like it should be easy to solve * It's a problem that doesn't require a large team to bootstrap an MVP

So you get a lot of "version 0.1" type solutions, as people set own to scratch their own personal itches. But then once version 0.1 is out the door they start looking at other peoples' itches, discover that there's a bazillion little wrinkles and corner cases that make it hard to evolve a specialized tool into a more general-purpose one-size-fits-all-one, so they just settle for leaving their own tool as it is rather than trying to address all those corner cases to get it to a "version 1.0" level.

I think we've agreed with one another, though perhaps I didn't word my version of it quite right the first time.

For a long time I used Emacs and org-mode for this purpose: It can track time when visiting buffers, so I simply needed to assign projects to buffers (most of the time).

We looked at doing things like logging git commit frequency to try and provide realistic estimates to users of their time that they could then confirm or alter. Realistically, with the diversity of talent we have here (both technical and non-technical) and the time it would take to do well, it didn't really seem too practical.

It would be awesome if WakaTime and others provided some way of interfacing with an API, so that individuals could track time in a way that made sense for them while reporting in a relatively consistent standard to a central system used for accounting and billing.

Yeah, I built (and later shut down) didlog http://www.didlog.com/ a while ago which I had hoped would eventually turn into something like this. Track code commits, calendar events, emails, files changing, etc to try to put together a map of everything you're working on.

I knew I'd be biting off more than I could chew if I tried to tackle time tracking from the start so I was hoping I could build something useful before moving into that area. Turns out, I couldn't (given my limited time and resources).

> It would be awesome if WakaTime and others provided some way of interfacing with an API

We have an API you can use to log your own time:

https://wakatime.com/api

https://wakatime.com/help/misc/creating-plugin

> I have enough trouble remembering what I did yesterday, let alone last month.

I have started to write this down, for my own good. Writing what I did at the end of the day, makes it easy to pick up where I left it the next day.

Additionally, for reviews&stuff I now have a list of everything I've done I can check before the meeting. The list makes it easy to remember that I should bring up how I solved issue X promptly Y months ago.

You might wanna checkout out my recent project if you're using Git: https://github.com/timeglass/glass - fully automated using git hooks and file monitoring and 100% offline, no account required

There are a lot of tools in that space, if you can bear the privacy implications. The one I used in the past was RescueTime (https://www.rescuetime.com/).

I'm currently using Timing.app. The only complaint (aside from some apps not being properly supported) I have is that there's no way to track across machines. I'm currently exporting and merging the data which is probably the best solution anyway.

TimeTracker is another great solution ( http://creativeworx.com/ ).

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