The Problem

Timeclocks are too cumbersome – just keep track of the things I did.

In my job, I tend to do a lot of development which involves losing track of time and getting lost in other peoples’ code.

I also happen to do user support which involves reacting to received emails, phone calls, and disturbances I notice on our systems.

Every two weeks, I have to report on “what I’ve been doing for the past two weeks” and tend to forget everything of importance (who I helped which actually translates to who owes us something) and only remember all the things that are really important to me – my code.

All the time tracking tools I investigated (including the online ones and even the command line ones (this one was the coolest)) were too cumbersome. I didn’t want to keep track of exactly how much time I spent doing X, Y, and Z, I didn’t want to remember to punch in and out of my own workspace. Thus, I wrote didit one afternoon.

Features:

• Simple, CLI, and doesn’t impose timeclock behavior on your otherwise flexible self.

• Respects .rst markup just like pypi and python.

• Will look for an $EDITOR environment variable when it needs one.

• Keeps its database(s) in python shelve files in a ~/.didit/ folder making it easy to reference your done-deals from other python code should you want to.

There are too many tools like this out there. This one isn’t a game-changer, but its about as simple as can be.

I hope you like it.

Installation

% sudo pip install diddit

Usage

% didit-remember -c work -m 'Wrote `diddit`.  Thank god.'
% didit-remember --message 'Helped L. User parallelize his ``Mathematica`` code.'
% didit-remember -c personal       # <-- This launches `vim` for me!

% didit-report --categories=work,general,personal
work
~~~~
2011-05-05:
  - Wrote `diddit`.  Thank god.

general
~~~~~~~
2011-05-05:
  - Helped L. User parallelize his ``Mathematica`` code.

personal
~~~~~~~~
2011-05-05:
  - Drank a beer.

One of the benefits of .rst:

% didit-report --days=7 -c work > thisweek.rst && rst2pdf thisweek.rst

Get the source

…from my github account and make it better!