Years ago, when I started remote-working, I realized I needed to be extremely serious with my work-time. If you work at home it’s absurdly easy to get distracted with housework around you. Or open facebook again (but thanks to a firefox plugin, Leechblock, that never happens again).
I thought I needed to track my focused time somehow. Despite there are online tools for this task, like RescueTime, I wanted something in my desktop. So I first gave a chance to Hamster-time-tracker. It comes in all linux distros, so installing it is simple, but for the best results I suggest you to set it to run at startup.
The good thing of Hamster is that it’s simple. Choose the task and start tracking. It can show you summaries with all kind of information (useful to report to your boss), but if you need anything more elaborated you can even get the raw data yourself, as it saves the tracking details in an standard SQlite database (in linux, ~/.local/share/hamster-applet/hamster.db).
I used Hamster for years, in a sick detailed way: a kind of micro-tracking. For instance, if I go to the toilet, I stop the clock; if I go to the kitchen to brew some tea, I stop the clock. This way I started to understand how I really work. In my case, in blocks of 1~1.5 hours. Also I realized that getting more than 4~5 hours of real focused work per day is impossible. Finally I understand some days I’m really productive (5 hours) while others I’m not (30 minutes).
Recently I updated my laptop and wanted to test an even better time tracker. With Hamster I can’t create subtasks easily. When working in a project, all of us start defining tasks, and splitting them into subtasks. But it’s also very common to discover, while working on a subtask, that you need to split it again. Or create an extra one, or…
I started using Task Coach, which allows you to split tasks anytime, while tracks the time. You can even track time for a particular subtask or for a task (sometimes useful when you are doing small stuff). You can set tasks as active, inactive or completed, and easily filter them to see the big picture or the detailed view.
Whatever you do, you may want to improve. And the better way is to track how you work, as a first step to have data (metrics) to analyze and improve. In my experience, tracking the time you are working focused helps you to see how well (or bad) are you doing and rewards yourself (or punish yourself) seeing the data.