Can anyone think of a way for me to log the amount of time spent with a particular project open? (I want to automatically know how long I’ve worked on a chart.)
The only thing I can come up with involves automation in the macOS Shortcuts app. I can get it to send the current date/time to a Note when Dorico is opened or closed.
Dorico creates a new log file every time the app is opened, and it keeps the last 10 of them.
(Mind you, I leave Dorico open for weeks, switching between different projects (and this forum) and staring into space for hours…)
Thee are apps designed for tracking the time spent in an app, usually for billing purposes.
This has come up on engraving forums many times. There are quite a few timing/billing apps available. You may have to click to stop and start the timer. You want something fully automatic but that can be paradoxical - what if the project is open and you go out for lunch?
I used to have a nice little tool, JobTimer.
It was limited to track the time of different projects and would automatically stop if the computer went idle for five minutes.
Sadly, it has been discontinued.
I now use Clockify. It is a lot more complex. Among many alternatives, it serves my needs the best - but I have to remember to start and stop the clock myself.
As I said.
It depends, how you have configured your computer. If there is no action or input from the keyboard, the computer can go into idle mode or into sleep. Some of these time trackers will register this and stop counting the minutes.
I quite like Timing (timingapp.com), though I’m not sure I’d pay out for it if it wasn’t included in my Setapp subscription.
It tracks the active window automatically and you can configure it to automatically pause when a period of keyboard/mouse inactivity is detected. These are the default settings:
Ykes! 10€ / month when committing to one year …
I use Timemator, one-time purchase on Mac and a separate one on iPad/iPhone, at which point one can sync the devices. I’m not 100% happy with it because it sometimes repeatedly crashes on launch, until it doesn’t anymore…
I’m looking forward to trying ‘Tim’ (also this a one-time purchase but more expensive) but I need spare time for that.
On the Mac one can actually use the native “Shortcuts” app.
I am just exploring a very simple time-tracking shortcut, where you can setup, start and stop projects. The data is automatically written into a Numbers sheet, which is stored in iCloud->Shortcuts.
One can pin macOS shortcuts to the menu
bar.
Very interesting! Let us know how it goes.
