One sign of a large project can be the degree of arcane hoop-jumping foisted on project members. Right now, I’ve a few projects underway where I’m supposed to track my time. In at least one case, the overhead of tracking my time will amount to more of my time than the time on the project I’m tracking. If you see what I mean. But here we are.
For the most part I’m rather enjoying using Toggl, which syncs nicely between web, desktop and mobile apps. It also nags me quite successfully, without being too smug about it. However, entering data is a little clunkier than I’d like, and the visual design and typography feel to me just a little… off, somehow. Like the app should be doing just a little more to render my recent history clearly? I’m not sure.
I’ll very likely stick with Toggl, but Brett Terpstra’s command-line/plain text system doing has caught my attention. I’m working partly on an Ubuntu laptop these days (more about that another time, perhaps, but the short version is: meh, but it was cheap) and tearing core tools out of the Mac/iOS ecosystem has its attractions. Presumably I could stick a doing log file in Dropbox and access it from whatever system I happen to be in front of, but these sorts of shell tools aren’t very usable from my phone, so there’s little net benefit right now. This is also why I haven’t (yet?) moved from Things to something more like .taskpaper format files. Also because Things is delightful and fabulous and sync works in exactly the way Dropbox sync all too often doesn’t.
Still: doing: interesting.