Work tracking from your shell.

I believe tracking your work is an important way of measuring productivity and is a habit that is very helpful to develop. But the thing about habits is - if they aren’t easy and accessible, you will eventually stop doing them - just like going to a gym that is 40 minutes away :) I tried different methods to log my work and failed. Google Docs, iCloud Notes, Notepad++, Sticky Notes, etc. I really wanted a way of tracking with very little effort so I could make this a habit. It's pretty obvious that we all spend most of our day on the terminal. Wouldn’t it be nice if I wrote a feature, committed it and then logged what I did right then and there without a second thought? What if I could also search this based on date so I could look at, for example, how productive I was in the past week?

workedon is another attempt of mine to make work logging a habit and improve my productivity.

This tool is useful in two ways - for logging work and fetching logged work. The implementation is very simple. Work is logged in the form of workedon <text> @ <date>or just workedon <text> (which uses the current date/time). There is a custom parser that reads the content, splits it at the @ to a work and a date component and then uses the awesome dateparser library to parse human-readable dates into datetime objects. This is then saved in a SQLite database (File location varies based on OS). Logged work can be fetched using multiple options that accept similar human-readable date/times. The same parser is used again to parse into datetime objects which are used to query the database. The output uses the current shell's pager to display a paged list similar to git log (your output may slightly vary based on your shell).

pip install workedon

• Python 3.7+

• Log work from your shell in plain text with human-readable dates/times.
  • The date/time is optional. The default is the current date/time.
  • The @ character is used to separate the text from the date/time.
• Fetch logged work with human-readable dates/times.
• Familiar Git-like interface.
• Filter, sort, delete, format and display logged work on your shell.
• Set date/time format of the output through settings.

Whenever workedon is run for the first time, a settings file named wonfile.py is generated at the user's configuration directory, which varies based on OS. To find out, run:

workedon --print-settings-path

Settings are strings used to configure the behavior of workedon. The currently available settings are:

• DATE_FORMAT : Sets the date format of the output.
  • Must be a valid Python strftime string.
  • Option: --date-format <value>
  • Environment variable: WORKEDON_DATE_FORMAT
• TIME_FORMAT : Sets the time format of the output.
  • Must be a valid Python strftime string.
  • Option: --time-format <value>
  • Environment variable: WORKEDON_TIME_FORMAT
• DATETIME_FORMAT : Sets the date and time format of the output.
  • Must be a valid Python strftime string.
  • Setting this overrides DATE_FORMAT and TIME_FORMAT.
  • Option: --datetime-format <value>
  • Environment variable: WORKEDON_DATETIME_FORMAT
• TIME_ZONE : Sets the time zone of the output.
  • Must be a valid timezone string.
  • Default is the auto-detected timezone using the tzlocal library.
  • Option: --time-zone <value>
  • Environment variable: WORKEDON_TIME_ZONE

Order of priority is Option > Environment variable > Setting.

To find your current settings, run:

workedon --print-settings

Check the default settings here.

$ workedon --help
Usage: workedon [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Work tracking from your shell.

  Example usages:
  1. Logging work:
  workedon painting the garage
  workedon studying for the SAT @ June 23 2010
  workedon pissing my wife off @ 2pm yesterday

  2. Fetching work:
  workedon what
  workedon what --from "2pm yesterday" --to "9am today"
  workedon what --today
  workedon what --past-month

Options:
  -v, --version  Show the version and exit.
  -h, --help     Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  workedon*  Specify what you worked on, with optional date/time.
  what       Fetch and display logged work.

$ workedon what --help
Usage: what [OPTIONS]

  Fetch and display logged work.

  If no options are provided, work
  from the past week is returned.

Options:
  -r, --reverse           Reverse order while sorting.
  -n, --count INTEGER     Number of entries to return.
  -s, --last              Fetch the last thing you worked on
  -i, --id TEXT           id to fetch with.
  -f, --from TEXT         Start date-time to filter with.
  -t, --to TEXT           End date-time to filter with.
  --since TEXT            Fetch work done since a specified date-time in the
                          past.
  -d, --past-day          Fetch work done in the past 24 hours.
  -w, --past-week         Fetch work done in the past week.
  -m, --past-month        Fetch work done in the past month.
  -y, --past-year         Fetch work done in the past year.
  -e, --yesterday         Fetch work done yesterday.
  -o, --today             Fetch work done today.
  --on TEXT               Fetch work done on a particular date/day.
  --at TEXT               Fetch work done at a particular time on a particular
                          date/day.
  --delete                Delete fetched work.
  -g, --no-page           Don't page the output.
  -l, --text-only         Output the work log text only.
  --date-format TEXT      Sets the date format of the output. Must be a valid
                          Python strftime string.
  --time-format TEXT      Sets the time format of the output. Must be a valid
                          Python strftime string.
  --datetime-format TEXT  Sets the datetime format of the output. Must be a
                          valid Python strftime string.
  --time-zone TEXT        Sets the timezone of the output. Must be a valid
                          timezone string.
  --help                  Show this message and exit.

• Your input is limited by your shell. Certain characters like the single quote ' behave differently. Put your content within double quotes to get around special characters.

  For example:

  workedon "repairing my wife's phone"
  

• The date parser which is used may misinterpret some irregular phrases of date/time, but mostly does great.

• There are some reserved keywords that are used as subcommands and cannot be used as the first word of your log's content:

  • workedon
  • what

  You can use double quotes here as well to get around this.

  For example, this will not work:

  workedon what my wife asked me to do @ 3pm 3 days ago
  

  This is fine:

  workedon "what my wife asked me to do" @ 3pm 3 days ago
  

• dateparser, for an amazing date parser. This project would not be possible without it.
• peewee, for a nice and tiny ORM to interact with SQLite.
• Click, for making writing CLI tools a complete pleasure.
• jrnl, fck and Simon Willison for some inspiration.