During the school year, I work from home on a part-time basis, and for most of the semester I kept track of my tasks and time on pencil and paper. At least, I tried. More often, when the time comes to write my end-of-day summary, I have difficulty remembering everything that I’ve worked on, let alone how much time was dedicated to each task. It’s typically at these points of crisis that I turn to technology to solve my problems (and though there is something to be said about the value of stepping away from the computer when planning and brainstorming, mundane time and task management is hardly an effort that should require creative juices. At least that’s my excuse for playing with new technology, as always.)
At any rate, this time the solution comes in the form of Grindstone 2 by Epiforge Software, a free program for the Windows platform. Linux users can consider checking out Project Hamster, but I’d like to detail my pleasant experience thus far with Grindstone here.
The most appealing aspect of Grindstone is that while it is relatively straightforward to use, the app includes enough tools to make the power user happy, too: diverse report generation allows me to export a nice-looking timesheet, glance at the summary for a task or for a given date/time range, and view a pie-chart breakdown if I’m feeling visual. Grindstone supports custom fields and values for sorting tasks, the ability to parse custom fields from task names (with a little Regular Expressions), multiple profiles, and a dozen seemingly minuscule features that nonetheless make a world of difference in usability.
After setting up a profile, selecting a task and clicking the Start icon displays the egg timer; this tiny window sits at the top of my screen and lets me select the current task I’m working on throughout the day without revisiting the main program window. The egg timer’s window opacity can be adjusted from the program’s Options dialog.
About half a dozen times throughout the day, I walk away from the computer without remembering to hit ‘Stop’ on the current task. But no worries: when I return, Grindstone’s inactivity timer triggers, yelling politely prompting to account for my time. If, on the other hand, I forget to start timing a task (which also happens more than I care to admit) upon returning from the 4th coffee break of the day, the application will display a friendly reminder.
(P.S.: Just in case you just noticed the change from XP to Windows 7, I must mention that Grindstone’s profile backup and restore capability is quite convenient.)
Confession time: as annoying as I thought these features would be at first, they have turned out to make a world of difference in rendering the time management system an effective way to manage my day. Of course, if the notifications are a bit too intrusive for your taste, their settings can easily be adjusted.
At some point, I decided I needed to be able to categorize my tasks based on priority. Grindstone easily accommodates this with custom fields, so I created a field named “Priority” and enabled sorting on that field.
So far so good, but manually adjusting every task that I had to enter after I entered it became tedious rather quickly. Luckily, the Advanced Entry tab of the custom fields box (under Profile Configuration) allows one to set a match and format pattern in order to parse a field value from the task name. In my case, I decided that I would like to be able to enter a new task such as “Begin world domination (high)” in the quick task pane and have the new task “Begin world domination” be automatically added to the “High” group. Unfortunately, the description of the “match” and “format” patterns is a little terse and there is currently no help topic available on how to use it. However, to my delight, my cry of distress posted on Grindstone’s user forums was answered in less than an hour. How’s that for customer support?
The result of the endeavor is shown in the screenshot below, which also attempts to explain the fields. (Thanks Daniel!)
Okay. I’ve saved the coolest part for last: the report generation.
In my opinion, this is invaluable asset both for reference — at the end of the day, as I wistfully look over the progress report wishing for better productivity (kidding!) — and due to the fact that it allows me to generate a summary of the time spent over the week (or any interval, for that matter). Below, the summary report is being used to copy and paste a pre-formatted table into Excel:
If your time tracking needs are a bit more advanced, Lifehacker reviewed some pretty heavy-duty time management solutions some time back. But as far as I’m concerned, Grindstone does the trick for the extend of my needs. Kudos to the guys at Epiforge for a great product!
Psst: when can we expect a Linux port?
