How to stay productive? What time management software is available?

Solution 1:

Hamster doesn't automatically track your actions, but it can be set to remind you every few minutes, which I actually find more useful. You can ask yourself every n minutes "am I still doing what I was planning to do?", "should I stop now?", "why am I not doing what I planned to be doing?" Then you can change course right away, rather than at the end of the day finding you spent three hours on askubuntu. :-)

Ultimately I want to develop more mindfulness of where I'm using my time, and these questions help.

Solution 2:

Project Hamster as you said is great, and while it cant track what you are doing, it can track what workspace you are using, and switch the time spent on it on your project; I have 12 workspaces, 1 for graphic, 1 for code development, 1 for testing, 1 for email and web surfing, and so on..

I bet if you just need to configure how do you use workspaces and Hamster.

Another suggestion may be Makesometime.com, but this is a web service and doesnt do nothing automagically, so i dont think it fits you

Solution 3:

I have just found a program named "arbtt". It can be installed via the Ubuntu repos. For further information have a look at its webpage. To put it in a nutshell arbtt records your open active and inactive windows (don't worry, it distinguishes between the current state^^) and then stores the log locally. Then the information can be read by arbtt-stats which can be configured to your needs by a simple language. Haven't tried it out yet, but definitely will as this sounds really interesting.