TrackTime: Review & 10 License Giveaway
One of the things I love about my mac is multitasking. I love being able to work on multiple things at once. However, I find myself getting distracted very easily. Either by something popping up in Twitterrific, or an interesting RSS article. Sometimes I look back at the end of my day and wonder where all my time went. With TrackTime, I don’t need to wonder anymore.
TrackTime gives you a visual representation of everything you did during the day. It tracks all the applications you used, what times you used them, and how long you used them for. But it doesn’t stop there. It actually tracks what music you were listening to when you were doing a certain thing. And if you were browsing the web, it would tell you exactly what websites you went too, and how long you were on each site. But most amazing is the way TrackTime is able to display all of this information.
TrackTime shows you a lot of information in very simple ways. The main view is the Time line view that is much like Garageband, but instead, for your entire day. There is a time bar along the top that tells you what time it was when you used each application, so you can easily go to 9:00AM and see what you did at that time. Then there are different tracks. The three main tracks are Applications, Music, and Websites. The Applications track is your main track, and tracks your changes between multiple applications by color coding them. If you click on one of the segments in this track, it will tell you what application you were using at that time, and how long you used it for. You can easily scrub along the timeline to look through your whole day, and see all the applications you used. On the lower right of the window, there is also a zoom slider that allows you to view more or less of the timeline at once.
The next track is the Music, or more appropriately, the Audio track. This is probably one of the most unique features of TrackTime. It will keep track of all the songs and podcasts you play throughout the day. Actually, anything you play from iTunes will be recorded in this track. But what’s even more cool, is that there is a little pie chart next to each song. This will tell you how much of the song you listened to before you skipped to another song, or stopped the music. Looking at this, can visually tell you what songs you like the best, and enjoy listening to.
The final track is for websites, and is only active when you are in a browser. This track will record all of the websites you visit during the day, and at what time you went to these websites. The websites will be color coded as well, so you can easily see if you are spending your whole day on Youtube or Facebook. The rest of the window provides easy access for you to pause or resume the tracking, as well as just pausing or resuming certain tracks.
Now you have all of this information. So what? What are you going to do with it? TrackTime doesn’t just stop at organizing the information – it actually analyzes it for you. All it takes is a click of the “Show Statistics” button.
The statistics view, allows you to see exactly how much time you spent in a certain application each day. You can see the number of times you switched to the application, and the average duration of each “session”. You can take this data, and sort it by time, or the average duration, to see where all your time is going. Most of my time is in Safari, iChat, MarsEdit, Twitterrific and Newsfire (I’m a little embarrassed about the Twitterrific one). This can help me plan out my days, and aim to spend less time chatting, and more time blogging. The statistics view extends for all your tracks as well. You can also view your Music and Websites, to see which artists you listen to the most, and the amount of their songs you listen to before skipping to another song. Finally, you can view which websites you spend the most time on. I guess this can help you set limits, and manage your time more efficiently.
I can go on and on talking about the features of this application. You can schedule tasks, and set date ranges for statistics. You can set privacy settings, and set Growl notifications. TrackTime is a really powerful app that gives you so much information about everything you are doing. However, it not only gives you the information, but helps you manage your time in projects, and look at your day, and plan it out. My only problem with apps like these, are that they run in the background. I hate having processes run in the background, because I fear that they take up too many CPU cycles and RAM. To put it bluntly, I was blown away by how few resources TrackTime uses to gather all this information. I am using a MacBook Pro, so your results may vary, but I found that TrackTime used only 0.4% of my CPU while I was in an application, and only peaking at to 2% for a second when switching between applications. Is it worth it? I think it is. For all the information it gives you, it has almost no effect on the speed of your computer.
TrackTime is a wonderful application that finally answers the question, “Where has the time gone?”, and helps you to organize yourself to be more productive, and hopefully more efficient as you work on your Mac. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re a statistics junky I bet you will really like it.
The guys at Mamooba have very graciously given us 10 licenses of TrackTime to give away. In order to enter the random giveaway, you must comment on this post with suggestions for the developer’s, or features you would like to see in Tracktime. If you can’t handle that we will also except a list of the three applications that you think you use the most on your Mac.
The giveaway will end at midnight EST on Monday, December 11th, with the winners being announced shortly after that. Be sure to subscribe to MacApper to not miss any of our regular giveaways.
this is totally a cool software. this has been repeated so many times however with the new MAC Leopard there are a lot more things you can do. For example Parental control. I would say the top 3 most used application would be, iChat, Itunes and safari
For a new feature, it would be interesting to track time spent on web-sites
And for top 3 most used applications: Adium, Opera and iTunes. This list is rather common and too boring.
I’ve always wanted to try this software, but never gotten around to it. I think a neat feature would be to allow the software to anonymously upload your stats to a server. The server could then analyze the statistics and pump out a totals page. That way people could go see which piece of software Mac users use most
New feature: I would like to see the documents I had open that day so i can see where i ve worked on.
Three most used applications:
Safari, iTunes, Netnewswire
I think a very useful feature woluld be an “alert mode” – it’d warn you when you spend too much time being non-productive. Like, if yoy spend more than 20% of the day in Safari browsing erotic sites – you are warned and encouraged to get back to work.
Wadd’ya think?
Integration with GTD apps.
Looks like a very nice app on the whole with good, detailed statistics.
I think that web access to the stats could be a nice touch though. Perhaps this could be done with some kind of wakoopa integration so that I don’t have to have two trackers open at once…
I would like to have the status visible in the menu bar.
for the brief time I’ve used it – itunes, tracktime and journler
This is definitely the app for me! I have been wondering for eons how I spend my time in front of my mac. I might spend 4 hours without even realizing it.
As for the top 3 most used softwares: Firefox, Adium, Photoshop.
I’d love to see a feature which shows the usage of website one visits. That’s be awsome!
Regarding the other apps I use frequently: I use Safari a lot, TextMate is a must for coding stuff, Thunderbird handles all the email. And Yummy FTP is my choice of ftp client. Ah, an of course, Path Finder!
Automatic project selection based on folder locations of files would be nice. If I’m working on a website for a client and quickly switch to another project’s file to make a quick correction it would automatically assign those few minutes to the correct project. When switching back to the original file(s) it would automatically select the correct project again.
I’d like to have document names (or frontmost window title) and being able to build a smartfolder tracking certain words. This would allow me to join url, documents, files and activities related to, say, a customer.
That would be even better with a spotlight plugin peeking inside the tracktime database
Is tracking what application you open, what music you hear, or what websites you open will give a picture about your productivity? I don’t think so.
This app is perfect for your superior to study “Where the ‘pricey payment’ has gone for some silly things”, so one can reduce your paycheck,but not yet boost ourselves.
It will be great if TrackTime can “track” real thing we do inside apps or websites, considering so many web-app out there. For example, you can just sit open Facebook for hours but doing things ranged from just poking your buddy, playing, sharing your work, taking IQ test, chatting for work, dating your girl/boy, etc.
Hope it will come true.
The 3 apps i use most are: Safari, OmniFocus and Mail.app
Remote access would be nice!
The 3 most used app: Adium, Firefox and Illustrator.
it would be great if it shows how may times you “force quite” an application , or if some application used like more than 50% of CPU.
great app by the way ^_^
A feature that I would find useful is a listing of the individual documents within the corresponding applications and the time spent on those. For example, I am working on a development project for a client and there are 20 different php files I have opened in Textmate. It would be nice to be able to see the time I spent on each of those files.
My 3 favorite apps: Textmate, Quicksilver, and Yojimbo
Feature Suggestion: A dashboard widget showing your app usage, with buttons to flip between the last hour/day/week. That’d be good for quickly checking how much work I’ve done in the last hour!
My 3 most used apps: Safari (definitely), TextMate, Mail.
Some way to integrate with GTD systems, for instance a way to import or define project and to track time per project.
And three most will be apps will be Safari, Mail and OmnniFocus…
My 3 favorite apps on OS X are:
TextMate, VisualHub and OmniWeb.
Greetings
My top 3 apps are:
Quicksilver, TextMate, and VMWare Fusion
This software looks amazing. I guess I wouldn’t mind a method to password protect the software. I’m not sure I want my loved ones being able to see that I spent 3 hours playing desktop tower defense when I was supposed to be working. My three apps would be Omnioutliner, itunes, and mail.
I can think of three features I would like to see (and I’m basing these on the article above and a quick look at the mamooba.com) – information on the docs I was working in (although at times I may move through certain docs rather quickly which could become over kill on reporting), another would be some type of auto/scheduled break message – “Hey you need to take a break!” I would want this to be a customizable item preferences also.
Most used apps… Safari, Mail.app, SKEdit
This looks like just the app I’ve been looking for to track my time at work. It is a little scary that it could keep track of all that and the interface is awesome.
The 3 mac apps I use the most, that did not come with my mac, are Quicksilver, Firefox, and Adium.
This is a great app and offers many useful ways to analyse your day on your Mac.
I think t would be great, if you could have it automatically switch to a specific project if you open a document in a specific folder. E.g. if you open /Documents/Project/test.txt TrackTime automatically switches to the project “Projekt”.
Since I use OmniFocus quite a lot, integration with it would be very cool, so you click in OmniFocus the start working on a task and TrackTime tells you how long you have been working on it.
Oh, I forgot one idea: TrackTime tracks the time you listened to a song and when you skipped it. What about making a automatic rating system for iTunes with this information? Currently I’m using http://tzisoftware.com/products/autorate for this, but with racTime this would be better I think.
New feature: See what documents have been open and for how long or even apps.
Three most used applications:
FireFox, iTunes, iPhoto
I would like to see the names of documents listed, much like Work Tracker does.
I think it would be nice to be able to set the ‘work hours’ of the day and then be able to set how many ‘work hours’ can be spent in a certain application and when the threshold is met, everytime you access the application, you get a ‘warning’ first. I think that would help me be more productive.
Three most used apps: Safari, NewsFire, Microsoft Messenger.
Being able to ‘hot key’ a category so while I am working in Pages I could hit a key combo and all tracking from that point could be tagged for client ‘X’. The if I jump to Safari or Eclipse it would not matter, but the statistics could be grouped by the category.
Also a summary export format that could be loaded into a Time Tracking tool like Dovico would make my billing much easier.
My most common apps are Pages, Safari and Eclipse
Sounds great!
Could this be combined with a reporting feature that would send a summary to say a parent about their child’s web activity? A similair feature is in several of the internet blocking programs. A summary list could be emailed or available online via password.
I’d really love the ability to create your own preferred spending pattern so the app can alert you when you’re spending too much time on something.
My 3 most used apps are: Safari, iTunes, Adium
Great software!!
However, i think tracktime record nicely about what had already happen (past), it would be nice if the software can suggest/hint the future base on what one have done in the past, e.g. if i had use iphoto for long period of time on last monday, there will be a popup or some kind of reminder, suggesting that i should use iphoto again on monday, that way, one will always have things to do….
I’d love to be able to tag certain websites that I spend too much time on. When I hit a predetermined time limit, the program would issue a “whoop whoop” siren alert and tell me to get back to work.
Going off of the commenters looking to track certain document/client projects, why not built in functionality for billing and invoices? OnTheJob has a really simple invoice function, and this app kicks OTJ’s butt in terms of tracking. It would be awesome if I could enter in hourly rates, see reports/earnings for hours worked, etc.
I hope I can tag an application or a web site so I know whether I’m working or procrastinating. As a grad student, I spend much time surfing the web for relevant research. In this case, I hope I can tag all my activities in Google Scholar as “work.”
I also hope help file can be accessed from the drop-down menu if it is available.
My 3 apps are Safari (for both work and procrastination), Microsoft Word (writing papers), and Preview (reading PDFs)
Anyway, great application!
I find that TrackTime has a nice interface and everything. It seems like a more advanced and focused version of Wakoopa. I wish TrackTime had some sort of way to share stats with friends without relying on simple screenshots. Whether its some sort of special file it creates that is shareable (and view only on the other persons Mac), or a web service that it will upload updates to every hour, day, or per request. I’m going to let this run and see what apps I use most often, here’s my guess:
Safari
Twitterrific
Mail
iChat
iTunes
Nice Review Michael
An rss feed of the output stream would be awesome, in case you wanted to show the world how much you goof off.
I think it would be cool if it also logged who you talked to in your chat program (be it iChat, or Adium, or otherwise), and for how long. That way, f you saw that you talked more to your friends than to your coworkers during work, you might want to change that.
I think the top three apps on my computer are adium, firefox, and microsoft word.
Nice app. I used slife for awhile, but this seems like a much nicer, and more full-featured alternative.
Is there a way for this data to be uploaded to a blog though? That would be great.
As a CAD Manager I find it extremely diffcult to track my time because I’m always off and doing something away from my computer.
Maybe the ability for it to realise you were probably away from your computer and have it pop up a question to ask you what you were doing and for how long.
I would find this absolutely priceless. It would mean my timesheets would always be accurate for once.
Also, the name of documents worked on would be good too, because all our file names contain their relevant project number,
Four features would make this the ultimate time-tracking software for me.
1). Keep track of which files were opened and close with each application.
2.) Allow me to “tag” each application. For instance: Adobe Illustrator = Design, TextMate = Development, Mail = Communication
3.) Let me build “smart playlists” from my application-use info. Possible criteria could include “Open File Name”, a tag, or the application name.
4.) Let me create invoices from my smart playlists or application-use info. OnTheJob by Stunt Software currently does a great job of creating simple invoices.
With these features, time-tracking would be about as easy and unobtrusive as backups are with TimeMachine. Make it Happen.
firefox, mail, and taskpaper!
I think this would be super helpful when done in conjunction with a consulting style time tracker. You can manually enter times spent.
1) Firefox
2) Quicksilver
3) Adium
iTunes, Mail.app and Firefox
Feature: Tracking what documents you’re working on/websites you’re browsing.
I hope you will ‘accept’ other suggestions as well.
I think it should be able to go to 11 for those times where one needs just a little bit more.
I’m a high school teacher. Computer Aided Drafting in fact. This would be a great method of keeping track of all assignments, testing periods, and the general chaos.
I think keeping track of clipboard items would be nice.. I lose a lot of information to the clipboard when I copy other things .. and I don’t like using iclip for that .. it’s not exactly what it’s made for.
Also, my top 3 apps are: Quicksilver, Camino, and iTunes.
I would like the ability to export or print the statistics, so that they could be integrated into my time reporting for work, for example.
Also, it would be very cool if I could set a threshold of, say, 1 hour of non-productive work before an alarm goes off and says, “ok, you’ve goofed off enough, now it’s time to focus!” So integrating limits and alarms would be another cool feature.
Lastly, the 3 apps I use the most are: Quicksilver, Yojimbo, BBedit.
Haha, funny how nearly every comment has got a negative bang?
I didnt use TrackTime but the three most used to me are: Firefox, iTunes and TaskPaper.
I work on two computers, at office and at home, so I need to trak both. I think that this can be done if both are on internet or, if not, find a way to join/import TrackTime data/preferences files.
How about this…
A little “micro$haft” counter that estimates how much time you didn’t have to spend rebooting, BSOD, or scanning viruses; because you’re using a Mac! Time estimates could be based on comparing the actual time you spent on a Mac program, with productivity loss estimates of its windows counterpart.
As #2 I also need to track time spent on web site, with a editable preference list to track only desired domain. Could be browser/app independent (so that I cant track time spent on a site even if I’m using Safari or Camino or Firefox).
Apps I use the most:
- iTunes
- Safari
- Adium
An email feature goes along way to prove to your girlfriend (or wife) that you weren’t browsing your most beloved links of porn sites.
I use Quicksilver, Adium and visual hub.
An option to present statistics as pie-charts or graphs would be great for easy comprehension and communications.
I know someone who would like this, but she uses a PC. Any comparable software for PCs?
@Ty There is Wakoopa, but it is not as detailed as this. You can try it out for mac or PC at http://wakoopa.com/
I Think I use most:
safari
Omnifocus
itunes
It would be awesome if there was a way to share this multi-platform or on the web.
Dashboard widget?
A web widget, to say how much time you’ve wasted on your site as well?
The app of full of sweetness, these things would just improve it even more.
I use Safari, Adium and iTunes the most.
On timeline, when I double clik on a browser session, I wish to see website list related to that session.
Maybe some way to sync between two different installs? I’m in grad school and do school stuff at home and at work (on a different computer). Or some way to log activities that weren’t tracked by TrackTime, even if it is just estimated.
- Track time spent on each Leopard spaces.
- Create group of apps to be tracked. Is something like project but related to custom apps group.
This is a good start, but with a few additions it could be the ultimate application for overcoming procrastination:
- The ability to tag applications and web sites (e.g., “work,” “procrastination,” etc.)
- Other ways of viewing the statistics gathered. See for ideas. I’d especially like to be able to see a graph of applications and web site use (grouped by tags) over time. (to see, for example, which days have been the most/least productive)
- The ability to set alerts for when a certain amount of time has been spent that day on a particular application, web site, or tagged group. (”Stop procrastinating!”)
- The ability to export statistics to tab-delimited text files.
My most-used applications are OmniWeb, NetNewsWire, and Adobe Acrobat.
In my post above, “See [censored] for ideas” linked to the web page for Pageaddict, a FireFox plugin with some graphs that would be useful.
- Edit track (add or remove time).
Amazing app – I hope to win a license!
My 3 top used apps:
1. iChat
2. Camino
3. iTunes
My 3 top used non-conventional apps:
1. Dreamveaver
2. Sling
3. xPad
Feature Requests:
- Object-based logging (Document, Window-Title, etc)
- “Smart Projects” (TrackTime ‘projects’ based on application/document groups)
- Export Functions (with selection of date ranges, applications, file formats, etc.)
Application Usage [According to TrackTime]:
- Safari
- FireFox
- Finder
(For what _that’s_ worth…?)
How about setting up “budgets” and having the app help you stay on top of them with programmable warnings like Budget 6 hrs/day, 30hrs/week max on browsers. Notify me hourly/daily/etc OR notify me at x% of budget.
How about better visualizations of tracking time used in apps as if they were stocks in your portfolio? And then you could see how stuff changes over time – maybe even be able to input stuff (in college from x year to y year or put milestones for projects at work to see how stuff went).
Compare your usage with others that are similar in “criteria” to you. Different criteria could be age, zip code, profession, etc? Could be a nice way to explore apps.
I suggest several ideas that have already been mentioned: app/site “tags,” “time budgets” w/ alerts, more stat views/charts, document tracking, and an export function.
The giveaway is now over. The winner will be announced in a few days.
How about color schemes for applications? I’d love to be able to download color schemes made by other users.
Web access to stats would definitely be a good idea.
Top 3: Safari, Mail, Messenger
Hi there,
I installed TrackTime a couple of days ago and wondered if anyone else notices a memory leak? It uses around 300MB RAM on my Leopard machine and still growing.
Greetings
The timesheet should be a valuable management tool, allowing for assessment as to whether resources are being deployed appropriately. Unfortunately, in the wrong hands, it can be something rather less valuable. In your case, your account director doesn’t seem to have grasped the point of the exercise. This could be because he/ she wants to demonstrate an amazing level of control over account activity- however, if I was their boss, I’d immediately be suspicious of such an apparent untrammelled grip on how the…
Web site tracktime – tell me when to get off Facebook!