Jun 19
Watch Your Time (Time Logger Utility)
Watch Your Time is a freeware application that helps you keep track of what you’ve done within a day. Its source code is also available under the GPL version 2 license.
Watch Your Time features:
- It works without installation.
(you can run it from a USB key) - It performs time logging by asking what you are doing every x minutes.
- It records your time data within an XML file.
- It remembers your last tasks for a period of time of your choice.
- It is able to aggregate what you’ve done by task, project and day.
- It is FREE.
Screenshots:
Requirements:
It is built using the .NET Framework 1.1 and should run within any environment that is able to run the framework. I also succeed to run it in Ubuntu using Mono (without the system tray icon).
Download locations:
- Watch Your Time v1.1.6.0 – Binaries only
- Watch Your Time v1.1.6.0 – Srouces and binaries
- Alternate location: Watch Your Time v1.1.6.0 – Sources and binaries on Softpedia
It has received the “100% CLEAN award granted by Softpedia” (quite normal for an open source software
)
Additional notes:
Anyone interested in requesting a feature or contributing to the application is welcome to do so by posting a comment to this page.
Being a consultant, time is important since its the base for invoices. This is why we’re asked to fill up time sheets. It is quite common to enter some additional details to tell what we were working on. In addition to this, we’re also often asked by project managers to fill a project tracking sheet.
Depending on the project, project manager, company policies, etc., the level of documentation requested may vary. But even when you don’t need to enter much data, it is a good idea to keep an history of your time records in case of dispute.
In order to provide this information I realize really fast that it was a good idea to either enter your time in the systems ASAP, or keep a trace of it anywhere. Sometime, the systems are not very friendly, it becomes easier to track your time apart and fill the systems once a week.
For this purpose I wanted a lightweight software, that does not require installation to run it (since you may not have administrative rights on the computer you’re using). After some research, I found a free software called UUR on download.com. It was good to keep track of time by providing those features:
- Works without an installation
- pop-up every x minutes to ask you what you are doing and log this information
I enjoyed it for a couple of weeks until I thought I could do one that would save me more time. Yes UUR was logging my time data, but I had to do the aggregation myself. So I end up with the Time Logger that I decided to share here.
You can find the software documentation on the next page…
Pages: 1 2
2 comments
One feature that I think would be useful is the ability to minimize to system tray or just minimize the application.
Clicking the “X” button does minimize to tray.
Minimizing to the taskbar could be possible, but the goal of the application is to record time as accurate as possible, so if minimizing to the taskbar, one could “forget” it there and it wouldn’t pop-up again.