Automatic tracking

Insights from hands-free analysis of your activity can often be fascinating.

TimeSlotTracker has activity monitoring and this includes an optional facility to take screenshots and place them in a user-defined directory. However, this isn’t the type of intricate user monitoring that some of the other options offer. Idle detection (what do you mean?–Ed), another useful feature, is a separate option.

Thanks to TimeCamp’s native Linux app, it can track user activity such as application and website usage, such as how much time you’ve spent on a specific email in GMail or a specific document in Google Docs. Some of this activity data is accessible in the various report and summary modes. However, some of the more advanced summary data specific to this type of data is only available on the TimeCamp paid tier.

Arbtt is specifically designed to capture user activity data in an automatic fashion. There is quite a lot of refinement available though configuration via a text file. It’s possible to set it up so that it looks for certain strings in the application title and assigns certain tags to certain activities. For instance, the official documentation offers examples that can assign the ‘social media’ tag to the log when certain sites are being visited. However, like much of Arbtt, this type of detailed tracking requires quite a lot of work to set up in the configuration file. Hamster lacks automatic time-tracking facilities. Timewarrior has a kind of automatic tracking. It enables you to define periods when you know that you will be engaged with tasks and exclusion periods. It takes quite a lot of setting up, however, and it’s limited in what it can do compared to TimeCamp and Arbtt.