After I’ve switched my job and start working for the KDS in this January, I faced the problem of regular time tracking of my activity to correctly report all my tasks during the day.

First, I’ve used one the most simple tool — Gedit :) I’ve configured shortcuts to insert time stamps in the text file. The biggest problem for such lazy person as I am was in the making reports which was not very simple — I’ve to open OpenOffice, copy timestamps there, convert time format, sum and analyze where time was lost.

Another problem was in fact that when I was left my workplace I’ve often forgotten to stop tracking of the time.

After recent post of Andriy Khavryuchenko about time tracking I’ve decided to try another tools for time tracking.

I’ve tried GnoTime, but it supposed to be monster for me.

Suddenly I’ve meet notice about Project Hamster. I’ve decided to give it a try and I’m totally surprised!

After a week of using Hamster, I’m in love with such his functions:

• Auto generated reports for any day, week, month. Hamster is also divide all tasks by categories and I’m using this function to divide my tasks by projects :)

• Hamster auto stops time tracking after 3 (or any other value) minutes of being idle

• Very easy start and stop of tracking time.

• Always show time tracker with current status in the panel.

And the biggest pleasure for me: now I’m tracking all my activity during the day — starting from the smoking, reading news and finishing with the reviewing of the code, writing the tests and code. And now I see where my time goes!

There are some pictures of the tool from official site, during next days, I’ll add my screenshots.

Applet in panel:

Time report:

Sort activities by categories:

This blog run on the modified version of the byteflow blog engine. Modification was done to run on the django newforms-admin branch. Some features of the byteflow aren’t fully worked. After I would done with them, I’ll contact byteflow authors and will make public access to the repo of the branch.