Record your desktop activities and analyze your efficiency (+kanban, +pomodoro)

Zixuan Chen — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 11:45:49 +0000

I sometimes work on several projects and as it's often the case I lose track of how much effort I've put to each of them🕗. Besides, I am bothered by distracting apps and mails when working. I'd love to know how much efficiency I lose due to these activities. At the same time, I use the Pomodoro method🍅 a lot at work. Why don't I combine them together✨? So I made Pomodoro Logger in the last few months.

It now supports

Use the Pomodoro Technique to manage your time
Collect and visualize your desktop working activities, i.e., the names and titles of the using apps, locally
Use integrated Kanban Board to make your schedule control easier
Analyze your efficiency (It will detect whether you are using a distracting app based on the setting. For the algorithm, I read a few papers about task switching and implemented a heuristic method. I'm still working on improving it with my friend who is majored in psychology)
Win / macOS / Linux

PomodoroLogger: A smart time logger that helps you schedule your desktop projects

Zixuan Chen — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 12:57:28 +0000

Link to the repo

Invest your time easily

Use Pomodoro Technique to manage your time
Collect and visualize your desktop working activities, i.e., the names and titles of the using apps, locally
Use integrated Kanban Board to make your schedule control easier

Pomodoro	Show Countdown in Tray

Session Finished	Switch Mode

Kanban Board	Draggable Card

Estimate Your Time Spent	Search Your Cards

Visulization

Pomodoro Technique 🍅

The working loop in the Pomodoro Technique is split into a 25-minute focus session and a 5-minute rest session. During a work session, the user focuses on one todo item and should not do anything irrelevant. The Pomodoro Technique can greatly improve the efficiency of work and study and alleviate work fatigue.

In the Pomodoro Logger, the app will record the names and titles of the apps you use on your PC during the working sessions. The titles of apps contain rich semantic information. For example, the browser title includes the title of the website being viewed, and the IDE often provides the project path or project name.

Pomodoro Technique - Wikipedia - Google Chrome
DeepMind (@DeepMindAI) | Twitter - Google Chrome
pomodoro-logger [C:\code\pomodoro-logger] .\src\renderer\components\src\Application.tsx - WebStorm

By connecting your todo items with the corresponding recorded Pomodoro sessions, you can analyze how often you are interrupted by email and social software, the time distribution of the application and application title used to complete the task. It will help you have a more comprehensive understanding of your working hours on PC.

Data 📈

Pomodoro Logger records your desktop activities when you are in a working session of Pomodoro.

It only records your application activities, including the name and title of the focused application, and low resolution (30 x 30) screenshot. You can disable monitor features in the settings.

You can import / export / delete all your data in the settings.

All the data is saved and processed locally.

Kanban Board

Pomodoro Logger has integrated Kanban Board to help you organize and estimate the time spent of your todos easily with confidence.

The lists in Kanban are divided into Todo, In Progress, and Done. Though lists customization is possible, you are required to preserve In Progress list and Done list in order to track, estimate and analyze your project time spent. You can set the estimated time cost on each todo card. Pomodoro Logger will assist you with the corresponding actual time spent record. i.e., When you are focusing on a Kanban board, it will automatically associate your Pomodoro session with the todo cards of In Progress list in the Kanban, which makes the further analysis possible.

To make the statistics more accurate, you can keep the cards of the In Progress list as few as possible to precisely reflect the tasks you are focusing on.

Download

This project currently supports Windows and macOS.

To download, go to release page.