Sometimes it’s quite nice to be able to see where time went. However, so do so in a plain text format.
Luckily for general (usually financial) accounting, there are projects like beancount (there’s also ledger, but I prefer the former).
Turns out time can be considered a commodity, like money, so keeping track of where time went is quite easy (and readable) with beancount:
;; -*- mode: beancount -*- 2021-01-01 commodity HR name: "Hours" 2021-01-01 open Equity:Life HR 2021-01-01 open Expenses:Work HR 2021-01-01 open Expenses:Work:Meetings HR 2021-03-02 * "" Expenses:Work 2 HR Expenses:Work:Meetings 6 HR Equity:Life
That’s already a good start (whether or not Equity:Life is a good
naming is probably rather a matter of taste), but you’ll quickly run into
trouble as soon as you spent only a few minutes on something. Noting down
45 minutes of work like this is still possible, but quickly gets annoying:
2021-03-02 * "" Expenses:Work 0.75 HR Equity:Life
For that purpose I wrote a small plugin (beancounttime) for beancount
that allows you to write down time in the HH.MM format:
;; -*- mode: beancount -*- plugin "beancounttime.time" "HR" 2021-01-01 commodity HR name: "Hours" 2021-01-01 open Equity:Life HR 2021-01-01 open Expenses:Work HR 2021-01-01 open Expenses:Work:Meetings HR 2021-03-02 * "" Expenses:Work 1.40 HR Expenses:Work:Meetings 6.30 HR Equity:Life -8.10 HR
Another good use of this is to track your accumulated overtime:
;; -*- mode: beancount -*- plugin "beancounttime.time" "HR" 2021-01-01 commodity HR name: "Hours" 2021-01-01 open Income:Employer HR 2021-01-01 open Assets:Overtime HR 2021-03-02 * "" Assets:Overtime +0.10 HR Income:Employer
In this example, the 10 minutes overtime of that 8 hour workday on 2021-03-02 is kept for later.
Please be advised to not merge these two uses of time accounting into one unified approach, like in this bad example:
;; -*- mode: beancount -*- ;; bad example, don't do this 2021-01-01 open Equity:Life HR 2021-01-01 open Expenses:Work HR 2021-01-01 open Expenses:Work:Meetings HR 2021-01-01 open Assets:Overtime HR 2021-01-01 open Income:Employer HR 2021-03-02 * "" ; again, not a good idea. Don't do this: Expenses:Work:Meetings 8.00 HR Assets:Overtime 0.30 HR Equity:Life -8.30 HR
What did you spend the overtime on? Was it in a meeting? Or processing the emails that came in during this extra long meeting?
Of course, you can keep track of these still, just do that separately:
;; -*- mode: beancount -*- 2021-01-01 open Equity:Life HR 2021-01-01 open Expenses:Work HR 2021-01-01 open Expenses:Work:Meetings HR 2021-01-01 open Assets:Overtime HR 2021-01-01 open Income:Employer HR 2021-03-02 * "" ; again, not a good idea. Don't do this: Expenses:Work:Meetings 8.00 HR Expenses:Work 8.30 HR ; e-mails Equity:Life -8.30 HR Assets:Overtime 0.30 HR Income:Employer -0.30 HR