Time tracking application for tracking use of a single app

Question

I'm in the market for a time tracking application. I work remotely for a company and I am having difficulties keeping to my 40 hour week—I am a little prone to work too many. I suppose the “easy fix” would be to work fixed hours, but I cannot easily do that for family reasons.

Most of the time tracking apps I've seen are about billing many different clients by the hour. That doesn't match my use case. I only have one employer, and I don't want to have to manually start and stop a timer. Because I work some of the time from home and some from the office I can't use location data to tell me how many hours I've worked. (Although that is a strong indicator; I don't normally do personal stuff in my office. The office is 15 mins away, so distant enough that location data should be reliable.) I'm wondering if it's feasible/possible to have something that tracks how many hours per week / month I've got a particular application open. We use Slack as our main communication tool, and I only use slack for work, so that might be a candidate.

As an aside, if you work using your personal computer: do you use a separate account for work? I haven't so far, but starting to wonder if it would be a good idea after all. Not sure I've got enough disk to handle the duplication of data.

Answer 1

Here is a pretty good app you could use. It may be a little overkill but who knows, perhaps you'll come to like and appreciate the extra features. Just make sure you assign each program in the correct category and PRESTO! you get detailed info about how long the program was open and also info about everything you were doing in between.

https://www.rescuetime.com/

Let us know what you think as I have never used the program myself. Personally, I use a timer app; I manually assign job numbers and hit start/stop for each individual project. I could work on 5 or 6 in the same day so it keeps the billing for each job accurate.