Recording our time is one of those things (along with tracking tasks) that many
of us are always in search of a better solution for. We might want to keep track
for billing purposes, or simply to figure out what the heck is eating up our days.
TimeSprite provides its own simple answer to this problem, at least for hours spent
in front of the computer: it wakes up once a minute, makes note of the active window
on your computer (assuming you haven't wandered off - after a while without mouse
or keyboard input, it just stops paying attention) and then goes back to sleep.
At any time, you can get a nice little pie chart of what applications you've been
using, along with more details summaries of your time. You can also export the summary
or details out to CSV for further munching by other applications.
There are a few ways you can tweak this automatic recording. If you like, you can
enter an arbitrary task name and tell TimeSprite to record time to that task until
further notice, so you can use it like a conventional time-and-billing stopwatch.
You can group windows together into larger chunks, so as to make a project-level
chart if you like. You can also enter arbitrary time directly into the database,
though only for the past and not for the future.
As a fire-and-forget utility, TimeSprite works quite well. Its memory footprint
is minimal, and it faithfully records what you're up to on your computer. Whether
that's going to be what you really want is another question. Do you really want
to know how many minutes a day you spend playing solitaire and cruising the Web?
Is activity-based time of interest to you rather than the more standard task-based
time? If it is, then TimeSprite is certainly an inexpensive way to keep track of
just how you use your computer. You can download a trial version to play with yourself
if you'd like.