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Time tracking is important – RescueTime
I’ve been using RescueTime for quite a while now. The main thing that I like about it is that after you launch it (in case it’s not on your startup list already) you can forget about it. Oh, and it’s free. Most of other time tracking software require you to push some kind of “record” and “stop” button. When I am working on a project for instance and a friend sends me an instant message or my boss needs to chat with me regarding something important I will more than surely forget to pause the time tracking program. So I will bill my client for the time I used to chat with someone else. That is not fair and can become annoying. It is relatively easy to forget about that. RescueTime runs quietly in your system tray and does all the proper tracking all by itself without you needing to hit some kind of buttons. For example I labeled the applications I use on my project with the name “project”. So, that way at the end of the week I can easily filter out all my data based on that label, so I will know how much time I used on that particular project. Very easy and effective.
As far as portability, I successfully managed to install, configure and use RescueTime on Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10. However there is still much to do in this direction as there are some issues (for example the terminal window is logged in with a different name almost every time). If you are an advanced python coder and know your way between the lines you should be able to solve this and other problems. Who knows, you might even lend a hand to the boys that maintain the project. Nevertheless, if you don’t need to do some fancy schmancy logging this could work for you. A version for your Mac is also available.
One could argue that saving all that logged data on who knows what server is risky. Well, it’s free, its great features are better than a lot of paid software, no complaints have been addressed yet. No matter how many reasons I find to enforce that RescueTime is so great one thing is for sure: if you can log all your data locally with half the features RescueTime has, do it.