Tech Life of Recht

For some reason, companies like to keep track of what their employees are doing, and where I work, it’s no different. Keeping track of which projects you work on and for how long gets tedious pretty quickly, and I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a number of people have the same experience as me: when you go to the time tracking system, you discover to some degree of horror that you’ve forgotten to update the system for the last 14 days. Now, what’s the chance of you remembering which tasks you worked on and for how long with any kind of precision? Probably none.

This is why I’ve been working on a small prototype for semi-automatic time tracking. It’s based on a simple concept: At regular intervals, a program pops up and asks what you’re doing right now. You click one button, and the program goes away. At some point, you can get a report of which tasks you’ve been working on.
Obviously, this is not completely accurate, but I hope it’s better than nothing. If you’re interested, you can try it out yourself. Remember, it’s a prototype, so there are probably plenty of bugs and missing features, but the basic functionality should be there.

The program is implemented in Java (actually mostly in Groovy), and can be launched via webstart. Java6 is required. Launch the Timesheet application here. If you do try it, please give your comments.
Should you want to reset everything, then delete the .timesheet_db file from user.home.