How long did that take?

I find it hard to track the time i spend on projects. You’d think that, since time is money, i’d be excellent at this. Unfortunately, not so. This is a mixture of laziness, forgetfulness and loosing myself in the work.

Now, however, i have a solution to this problem. TST, or “Time Shall Tell” is a nice time tracking tool, written in Python. You select a project, start the timer, and you get a nice, small desktop widget, counting up the seconds, minutes and hours you’ve been working. Its got a simple pause feature, and when you are done, you can enter notes. Nothing is set in stone, you can go back and re-edit any values after the fact.

The only bummer is that this software has pretty high requirements for anyone who wants to install it. There are several dependencies, even with the binary installer, and you also need to have access to a computer running MySQL.

I contacted the developer, to enquire about helping to make the DB and install issues a bit less steep, and since its written in Python i figured i actually could help. The dev got back to me, and it sounds like he is going to be doing some work to change how the DB portion works. I suggested moving to SQLObject, which would factor out all the SQL statements, and also give access to all the different DB platforms that SQLObject supports. The one that i think is most important for this software is SQLite, which runs pretty much everywhere, and is a snap to setup, even for a typical windows users. I’m not sure if i will be playing a roll or not, but i’ve offered my help.

If you are technically savvy, its not so hard to get it all setup, and, if you are looking for a nice, simple tool to help you track your time, this one is pretty good.