Show HN: Tock, a Time Tracking Tool by 18F (opens in new tab)

On the theme of constantly re-inventing time-tracking, it's interesting that 18F called out chosen in their write-up of their time-tracking solution, since chosen is developed and maintained by Harvest, which primarily sells a time-tracking solution.

https://www.getharvest.com/

I was thinking, that looks just like Select2 which I've used a few times and seems it's a more actively developed plugin, inspired by Chosen. Differences discussed here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13575531/what-are-the-di...

Man, that is nice. Oh the hours I've spent on that...

Nice! If only I had seen this last Wednesday.....

Doesn't work on mobile?

> Time tracking is one of those things that I see constantly being reinvented. Whether it's spreadsheets that get emailed, completely custom solutions, or one of the numerous services available, few of them actually provide anything new.

I think that's because nobody provides enough hooks in enough different places to make something work for everyone. I'd call it the SAP problem. First you spend $3mm buying it and then you spend another $20mm customizing it.

Once the assumptions about how something will work are baked in, it's very difficult to change the database schema without breaking everything, and writing a translation layer on top of it is probably more work that it's worth.

A truly universal time tracking app would take a few years and a few million to develop properly so that it can be extended and changed and customized and by the time you've supported a million different use-cases it would have been easier for a dozen different people to write their own.

For a long time I used Emacs and org-mode for this purpose: It can track time when visiting buffers, so I simply needed to assign projects to buffers (most of the time).

We looked at doing things like logging git commit frequency to try and provide realistic estimates to users of their time that they could then confirm or alter. Realistically, with the diversity of talent we have here (both technical and non-technical) and the time it would take to do well, it didn't really seem too practical.

It would be awesome if WakaTime and others provided some way of interfacing with an API, so that individuals could track time in a way that made sense for them while reporting in a relatively consistent standard to a central system used for accounting and billing.

> I have enough trouble remembering what I did yesterday, let alone last month.

I have started to write this down, for my own good. Writing what I did at the end of the day, makes it easy to pick up where I left it the next day.

Additionally, for reviews&stuff I now have a list of everything I've done I can check before the meeting. The list makes it easy to remember that I should bring up how I solved issue X promptly Y months ago.

You might wanna checkout out my recent project if you're using Git: https://github.com/timeglass/glass - fully automated using git hooks and file monitoring and 100% offline, no account required

There are a lot of tools in that space, if you can bear the privacy implications. The one I used in the past was RescueTime (https://www.rescuetime.com/).

TimeTracker is another great solution ( http://creativeworx.com/ ).

I wrote mine, but I track tasks and milestones rather than time spent.

Time tracking makes sense for freelancers and other people who bill by the hour but personally I tried rescuetime & co. and I do not see the point in knowing how long I was on facebook or how long I spent editing a particular file.

Milestones require manual input but I find that information much more relevant.

I have tried various solutions and finally decided on this one: https://github.com/samg/timetrap

Not free, but I use Klok (http://www.getklok.com/) and enjoy it

If you're using git: https://github.com/timeglass/glass

As a former subcontractor that was forced to use Deltek for a couple years, I will agree that it's the most popular... but I haven't the faintest notion of why. It wasn't the worst option available, but that didn't stop it from being terrible regardless.

Time-tracking keeps getting reinvented because no one's solved it definitively yet. I don't think anyone ever will, either; time tracking relies too much on individual context for it to be wholly standardized.

Given that there is no download link or price, I'm going to assume that 18F is not the kind of place that was going to pay top dollar for a cruddy, expensive third party service.