Been working on a time tracking utility for a while now and made timetracker to basically track what I do on a daily basis on my gnome desktop. From being able to tell when I’m chatting with a friend to on the web doing social interactions on facebook or twitter. The application works very well for me and has been built so you could easily extend it to monitor your Mac or Windows desktop by creating your own windowmanager instance.
The reporting output has also changed significantly from starting with a default of using the hamster time tracking utility to moving to an online toggl service which can handle the amount of data generated on a daily basis by my usage patterns. The hamster applet wasn’t designed to handle a few thousand task changes per day and was really having issues keeping up. I filed a bug here in the hopes that gets fixed in the future. Meanwhile the default tracker is the toggl tracker.
toggl offers a free account for tracking your activities and seems to have a simple and clean interface. I still need to figure out exactly how to inject the tasks into each project/workspace in a way that makes toggl’s stats and graphs interesting to the end user.
If you’re interested in trying out timetracker, then start by reading the README at the base of the project and it will let you know how to install on linux system. For those of you interested in using this on another OS please contact me so we can work out how to achieve this.