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Time Keeping with ledger {#sec:timekeeping}

ledger has a built-in set of directives that enable tracking time spent doing activities. These directives create transactions under the hood in commodities for seconds, minutes, hours, and so on. It establishes commodity conversions that allow ledger to report meaningfully on time spent, regardless of the unit of time.

This author was introduced to ledger not through personal finance, but through a search for a better way to track consulting hours. As such, he's tracked time for years using ledger. This section briefly covers these practices and links to existing, production-quality tooling enabling time keeping complete with analysis tools.

@Lst:timekeeping shows a day in the life of ledger time keeping through its timelog mode. Interacting with these time records is easy: you can use balance and register just as if these records were normal transactions. @Lst:timekeeping_bal shows the balance report.

Listing: A simple timekeeping transaction record (time.ledger) {#lst:timekeeping}

; My convention:
;   N: non-billable time | B: billable time | A: away time; PTO, holidays
i 2020/07/03 09:30:00 N:Email
o 2020/07/03 10:00:00
i 2020/07/03 10:00:00 N:Development:Coding
o 2020/07/03 11:45:00
i 2020/07/03 11:45:00 N:Meeting:Standup
o 2020/07/03 12:00:00
i 2020/07/03 12:00:00 N:Development:Coding
o 2020/07/03 12:45:00
i 2020/07/03 12:45:00 N:Development:CodeReview
o 2020/07/03 13:15:00
i 2020/07/03 13:15:00 N:Development:Coding
o 2020/07/03 16:00:00
i 2020/07/03 16:00:00 N:Meeting:Development:Pairing
o 2020/07/03 17:00:00
i 2020/07/03 17:00:00 N:Training:ConferenceTalks
o 2020/07/03 17:30:00
i 2020/07/04 10:00:00 A:Holiday
o 2020/07/04 18:00:00

Listing: A balance report on @lst:timekeeping {#lst:timekeeping_bal}

ledger -f time.ledger bal

These directives can be kept in your financial records or a separate file. This author keeps his in a separate file on his employer-owned workstation and backs them up to a cloud file hosting service.

If you want to give this time tracking system a try, check out the production-quality scripts noted in @tbl:timekeeping that are well-exercised since their origin starting around 2013.

::: tryit

TRY IT: Think about how you spend your last two days and represent that in ledger timelog form.

:::

Table: Colin Dean's time keeping scripts {#tbl:timekeeping}

Script Purpose
t A script that automates the creation of ledger timelog entries
_t_completion Provides bash shell completions for t]
analyze_t Uses t and gnuplot to produce graphs of weekly hours 1
hours.1m.sh A plugin script for Bitbar to show current task and daily/weekly hours in the macOS menubar

Listing: t options {#lst:t_options}

t help

Footnotes

  1. The graphs are focused on combating overwork by visualizing hours worked and showing when and by how much those hours worked exceed 40 hours per week. ↩