this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
17 points (100.0% liked)

Free and Open Source Software

17934 readers
16 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi all, 

I'm an entrepreneur and as such need to keep track of the amount of hours I work, as I need to reach a certain minimum. 

My needs are quite minimal. I want the following fields: 

  • A date drop down; 
  • a category selection drop down (PR, financial, etc); 
  • a field for comments; 
  • and I want to enter an amount of hours worked (I would prefer not to have to enter a start time and end time separately as that is more actions to perform and more than I need) 

Ideally this would be editable on my phone as well as on my PC, and being able to quickly add up the hours worked would of course also be helpful. And being able to see a calendar overview, perhaps. 

I have a self-hosted server, so I could simply make a spreadsheet and edit that, but that still seems like it's not as fast and easy as I'd like. 

I've been trying out Pendulums, but their system of clocking in and out doesn't fit my type of activities, and manually entering them gives me too much to have to click on (including start time and end time, while I just want to enter an amount of hours). 

I much prefer open source software, but I've been having a hard time finding something to fit my use case. I imagine that for my case, it doesn't need to be something that's specifically for keeping track of hours worked—something that provides some kind of frontend to fill in a spreadsheet would suffice, I imagine. 

Does anyone have any ideas for FOSS that could do something like this?

top 8 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I use Emacs' Org Mode. It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but it is highly versatile.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Not really an application you are searching for. But a valuable tool for my passive time tracking is:

https://activitywatch.net/

For being really useful to work with having different defined project some work is required to setup the filters but after that it works like a charm.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

My only complaint with activity watch is that viewing my history or finding exactly when I worked certain tasks is not possible. I can’t historically track tasks and their start and finish times.

It is entirely possible I have missed this functionality but I haven’t seen anything to indicate it’s there

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I use Time Recording on mobile for this. It's not FOSS but it does everything you want, exception being not on the PC.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Have a look at kimai.org

The have a self-hosted option and apps (didn't test those though).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

android only, but this app is great for time tracking. it does everything you list and much more, like individual activities that can be categorised, tags for activities, setting time goals, statistics to show time spent and streaks and so much more.

not sponsored but it really is worth a look

edit: also GPLv3 licensed

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Wakatime has a rich ecosystem of plugins and integrates with most software applications (e.g. vim), and something similar might be said of project hamster. Anyway , I'd recommend timewarrior since it's what I had in the past..