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Developers, How do you track your daily work?

Mehul Lakhanpal on February 24, 2022

There are platforms to track team progress (Jira, Trello) but how do you track your daily tasks on a personal level?

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Ben Halpern

I'm a little old fashioned and use a physical notebook. I use our team tools for team progress, but personally I find I like to write in a book, cross things out, sometimes put a symbol to represent nuance that is just for me.

One software tool in the ole toolbelt I really do like is git standup.

It's nothing elaborate, but it's a nice little git tool that helps me recall recent commits. My work isn't so tightly tied to my coding commits anymore, but it's still a really useful little utility in general.

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Mehul Lakhanpal

That's nice. Physical books are the best. I'll checkout what git standup is. Thanks :)

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Ricardo Zorzal Davila

I had developed a CLI for something like this command. npmjs.com/package/git-report

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Jesse M. Holmes

I write everything down in markdown files. I'd love to sync it to a secure repository, but I haven't looked into it. I suppose I could establish a gitlab setup at home, but maybe there is something better? Anyway, for now it's in a private gitHub repo, and if I feel like it shouldn't be written down, I don't.

As far as tracking the actual work, I've started taking note of tasks I've done more than a few times so that the next time they show up, I will have a realistic expectation for my estimate.

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scottshipp

I wouldn't feel so bad about using the cloud-based Gitlab or GitHub services, and I have done so in the past. If you have anything that you deem sensitive, an easy thing I have done is to add my "bare" markdown (*.md) files to .gitignore and then use PGP to encrypt them into *.pgp extension and then check in only the PGP-encrypted files. That should be more secure than a privately-hosted instance.

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Mehul Lakhanpal

Wow..that's dope. Good way check-in secure stuff.

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Filip Oščádal

PGP? why not OpenSSL = AES

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scottshipp

Sure, that would work similarly

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Jesse M. Holmes • Edited

This is so obvious. Must be why I missed it! Thanks, Scott!

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Mehul Lakhanpal

How about gist's?

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Jesse M. Holmes

Privately hosted gists? Is that what you mean?

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Mehul Lakhanpal

Yes

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🌌 Sébastien Feugère ☔ • Edited

I keep a diary in a simple directory tree:

├── 2022
│   ├── 01
│   │   ├── 2022-01-25.md
│   │   ├── 2022-01-26.md
│   │   ├── 2022-01-27.md
│   │   ├── 2022-01-28.md
│   │   └── 2022-01-29.md
│   ├── 02
│   │   ├── 2022-02-01.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-02.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-03.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-04.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-07.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-08.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-09.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-10.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-14.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-15.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-16.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-17.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-18.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-21.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-22.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-23.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-24.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-25.md
│   │   ├── 2022-02-28.md
│   └── 03
│       ├── 2022-03-01.md
│       ├── 2022-03-02.md
│       └── 2022-03-03.md

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Simple to grep or to browse manually. I have a script that allows to create the individual files. Each one contains a template that looks like:

# Project Name 2022-02-03

- done
- todo
- blocking
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I write everything in Markdown lists. I plan to improve the script so that what is left as todo in the previous day's entry is automatically added to the current day's entry.

I found out that this methodology helps me a lot to report to my managers and during daily stand-ups. Each time I achieve something noticeable, or I need to remember something that doesn't deserve interruption to my team, I stash it in the diary entry.

No matter to say that it can drastically improve the life of persons suffering from stress, anxiety or impostor syndrome.

If you find it useful, it is available.

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Mehul Lakhanpal

Wow.. that really cool

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Abbey Perini

I've started using the app Structured on iOS. Before that I used Plan.

I also write physical notes - one page for each day. I put the date at the top along with a to do list and any notes I take that day. Usually everything's grouped by ticket number or meeting name.

I set up the next day in my time blocking app and notes before I sign off each day.

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Mehul Lakhanpal

I am on team android for now. Anyways good to know :) Thanks

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Abbey Perini

Plan is on android. 🙂

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Pandita

I have an obsidian vault for work, a scheduled vertical planner for work as well (I know I could do it in Obsidian but I like the planner!), I have a small snoopy planner for my personal and home tasks and another for my habit tracking :3

I don't use them everyday because life just happens, but having them has helped me a lot to be on top of my work and to know what is happening during a week. It's also great for personal retrospectives :3

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Mehul Lakhanpal

Thank you guys :) Was not expecting such an awesome response. I use Notion on a personal level and offcourse notebook otherwise use the readme.md file of my projects. I write all the tasks there and once done use the markdown's checkmark feature.

Anyways I had actually asked this question to do some validation on what are tools available in the market for now.

I launched a side project Fireboard - A work tracker for software developers.
Please check it out. It's completely free.

I know it's too late to validate but I just wanted to know thoughts about how people actually track their personal tasks.

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Brad

Toggl to keep track of the time I'm spending, and github what I spend my time on.

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scottshipp

I experimented with every possible daily task tracker and finally wrote a new one, which I have open-sourced. It is for anyone who lives on the command line and centers around simple *nix text capabilities. You can use it for notes too.

I wrote a four-part series about it at dev.to/scottshipp/series/15100

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Yogini Bende

I do it with the combination of 3 tools

  1. Wakatime
  2. Notion
  3. Clockify

Wakatime to track the total time I spend coding. I am totally in love with this tool and its integration with VSCode. It make me understand all the details of how and where I spend my time when I was coding, productive hours, technologies I code in, etc.

Notion is to have a sorted list of my tasks. I keep doing a lot of experiments with this.

Clockify, to allot the time to tasks. This is also optional as you can use simply any other task timer for this.

But these tools become very handy and help me a lot to be productive.

Hope this helps :)

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Mehul Lakhanpal

Yes, thanks for replying. I myself use Wakatime & Notion. Will try out Clockify. Thanks :)

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MrakCw Dev

I use Code time app.
Everyday before one hour to end work time i have report from today) 🔥
And weekly report on email with all data))🌟
🚀 and this on free acc )
14+ month i use this app 👌

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Tawhid

On how much coffee powder was there before and how much is now left .
Jokes aside , I use "Clickup" to monitor progress.

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Marco

I use clockify, primarily via the desktop app. Really helpful in the end of the week/month to get an overview about my working hours. Also because all the tracking is saved for your account, so you can also simply start and stop timers via the iOS app.
You just have to get used to always start your timers correctly for each client/task.

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Mehul Lakhanpal

Need to check out this app. I am only tracking coding activities via waka-time

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Sherry Day

Our team uses Notion so I use it for a lot of personal stuff to not change context

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Mehul Lakhanpal

That's great. All my life is on Notion too. My team uses Coda though.

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Vivek

I use WakaTime, it tells me how much I coded, on which project and my daily goals it is an awesome tool

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Albert Angmor

I use waketime too. and google tasks but I am still looking for a system that works for me. I might have to build it like @scottshipp did.

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Mehul Lakhanpal

Yeah, WakaTime is great.

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mirko

My best friend since many years is a simple plain text file journal.
I create a section for every work day and create a new file every year.

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Mario Santini

I just use a todo list, but I'm not regular.

Usually I work on a single task for days or weeks, and don't have many other different activities to worry about.

But in that case I just use a plain todo lists with an Atom extension called Tasks.

I also use the Outlook calendar to keep track of those activities where time frame and date is important, not only in the future.

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Luc Yen

I use OneNote myself.

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official_dulin • Edited

Web Activity Time Tracker

dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/up...

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alfiks

Usually Notion and a good old notebook.

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Mehul Lakhanpal

Many people seem to use Notebook approach. Good to know that.

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Lutchenca Medeiros

I use a Notion template with "meeting notes", a basic kanban board with to do, doing and done, and overall pages with stuff I'm working on

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Filip Oščádal

Google Keep :) I also keep Keeping when walking in the woods, putting in ideas.

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Manuel Ricci

I use Clickup for tracking tasks for my projects and Toggl to track time for each tasks. Clickup offers an integration for Toggl that permit me to avoid to pay for that kind of feature.

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Rémy 🤖

I've got my personal Trello board for my stuff.

When it's about reporting on time spent, I've got a script that recovers my tasks from my cross-project Git history (it's more or less but who cares).

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izio38

I'm really surprised that no one mentioned brain. 😏
I personally use a simple text file, because all the fancy stuff other platforms offers disturbe me

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Mehul Lakhanpal

haha..difficult to remember stuff xd

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Vince Daniel De Leon

Wakatime

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Natti Katz

I use personal trello board with 4 lists that I prioritize tasks according to the "Eisenhower Matrix"

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Gonçalo Dias

TFS, and also use Clockify

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Mehul Lakhanpal

Clockify is for time tracking on chrome tabs I guess?

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Medea

I use GitHub for issues, commiting and logging

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Stuart Dotson

I use BeyondDone. It automatically generates a todo list from my employer Github, Jira, and Confluence accounts. When I complete something, it's automatically marked done. I manually add items for things from other platforms. beyonddone.com