ttt

Timeless Time Tracking

Tracking

# Synopsis:
$ ttt <project> [task] <action> [notes...]

# Examples:
$ ttt dinner prepare.veggies estimate=25m
$ ttt dinner prepare.veggies start
# (some time passes)
$ ttt dinner prepare.veggies end

$ ttt meeting estimate=1h
$ ttt meeting begin
# (go to meeting)
$ ttt meeting stop
# (meeting has adjourned for lunch)
$ ttt meeting estimate=3h
# (it's already gone overtime and there's still a lot to do)
$ ttt meeting start
# (everyone's back from lunch)
$ ttt meeting end

Project can be anything, action is one of: start, end, estimate=<duration>. start and end are obvious, with the caveat that "ending" may be any of "pausing with the intent of starting later", "finished", "done for the day", etc. estimate=<duration> is special and indicates that you're estimating the amount of work to be done on the task (or today, if the task is not specified) to be <duration>. That duration should be expressed in short form, e.g. 3d or 30m or 2h15 or 1h15m23s etc. Valid units are s (seconds), m (minutes), h (hours), d (days), w (weeks), M (month) and Y (year).

The format for task is free-form, but our convention is that subtasks are delimited with a .. I.e. task.subtask or task.subtask.item.

Anything else passed to the command is considered part of the free-form notes.

What it does

All that command does is record locally (in the ~/.ttt/entries/ directory) all the information you've given it and the exact time you've run it.

You can't record things in the past, nor can you in the future. The command doesn't even care if you've already got a task "running" or if you're going over your estimate, or if you've already set an estimate. It just records a time and a payload of data.

And then what?

The format is uber simple and in JSON, so you can build your own reporting tools to make this useful. For now this all falls on you, but as soon as we've got time we'll add some demos and standard tools here.

Why Timeless?

Most time tracking systems show a timer running up, or allow you to enter times. This doesn't. It records the time itself and never shows it to you immediately. I've found this increases productivity because you stop caring about the time you spend and instead focus on the work. When you review your day or week, then you can see how you've done, but not before.