Background

I spend an awful lot of time sitting in front of a computer, working on many disparate projects. When I need to gauge my time it would be great if I could just fire up a simple tool to see where I’ve been spending my time.

The features I need in a time tracking tool are:

  • Easily accessible data, in a format that can be processed simply

  • Ability to work off-line, because those times are considerably more common than some people seem to think

  • Works on all the platforms I regularly use; desktop, mobile phone, ZipIt, and more

Now rdial is born, and I can realise those dreams!

Philosophy

A few interface choices in rdial may be need a little explanation. Any one of them may well be enough to deter you from using rdial at all, but that is fine as other options are out there!

Explicit new tasks

It is an error to try to start a task that doesn’t already exist in the database

If you wish to create a new task you must give the rdial start --new option when starting the task. This should — with hope — catch typos and task name “thinkos”, and it has proven to do exactly that for me.

Switch vs “stopstart”

It is an error to try to start a task when another is running, or switch a task when no task is running

If you wish to start a new task you must stop the previous task. At first it seems natural to just accept that rdial start should complete the previous task, but doing so encourages users to not be aware of their current state.

Similarly, if you wish to switch to a new task then a task must be running. It might be convenient to make rdial switch just start the new task if a task is not running, but again it encourages users to be unaware of their current state.