Time monitoring

The time-monitoring package provides useful tools to monitor your time. It can be used to improve productivity, or to generate invoices.

Installation

Requirements: The package is based on python and shell.

We provide an installation through the pipy package repository, hence you can use pip to download it.

$ pip install time-monitoring

If you are working with conda environments, make sure that your pip command is linked to conda by typing $ which pip and making sure that the output displays conda installation path.

Once you have install the package, you should initialize buffer files with the following command

$ setup_time_report

Buffers files are kept in the folder time-monitoring of your home directory. This is specified by the BUFFER_PATH variable in the file src/time_monitor/config.py. If you want to modify this location, you should download the code source, modify those variables and build the package (e.g. by running $ python setup.py install).

Shell commands

This package provides the following shell executables.

Basic commands

• The begin command

$ begin <activity> -m --message "<optional message>"

This command indicates that you have begun a new activity specified by <activity>, e.g. <activity>=work. You may add a message such as "fixing issue 31".
If you use this command while another activity was already declared, it will assume you just stop the precedent activity.

• The message command

$ message "<message>" "<first optional message>" [...] "<final optional message>"

This command allows you to add a message without modifying the activity you are currently pursuing. For example, if you have already declared being in your spare time and decide to read the press and would like to monitor this, you can add the message "reading the press".

• The stop command

$ stop

When you stop an activity and do not begin a new one, run this command.

• The report command

$ report

This command saves all activities recorded since the last report in order to generate a new report. This is useful to generate statistics or invoices.
Reports are numbered according to the format <YYYY><MM><NB> where <YYYY> and <MM> denote the current year and month and <NB> is counting the number of reports generated so far in the month.
Past activity reports are kept in a data folder specified by the variable DATA_PATH of the time_monitoring/config.py file.

Advanced commands

• The activity command

$ activity

This command opens the buffer file that records your current activity. It is useful to check it to make sure you have declared it correctly and eventually correct it.

• The stats command

$ stats -r --report <report number>

This command sums up current period activities, or the activities saved in the report <report number>.

• The invoice command

$ invoice -a --activity <activity> -r --report <report number> -p --price <hourly rate> -c --change <change rate> -i --invoice <invoice number>

This command is useful to generate invoices. You can bill at a given <hourly rate> price for a given <activity> regarding houred reported in the report <report number>. The generated pdf file will be located in the folder specified by the variable INVOICE_DESTINATION in the file src/time_monitor/config.py.

Advanced installation

For security reason, newer versions of python will not install the latex data files provided by this package -- older versions will install it into your python prefix folder which can be located by importing the sys module and printing the value of sys.prefix. If so, you will need to copy and paste the latex folder into the folder specified by the variable LATEX_PATH in the config file.

There are few variables that are chosen for you, that you might want to change if you were to use this package to its full potential. In particular, there are macros defined in the file latex / constants.tex.