Table of Concents

1. What
2. Input data
3. Output example
4. Architecture overview
5. Can I use this?

What

This is a simple time tracker lambda and DynamoDB based service, built as a project to learn clojure and micro services. The initial inspiration came from reading the book 168 Hours, in which Laura Vanderkam asks us to really see what we are doing with our time. There are 168 hours in a week and her claim is that although we feel we never have enough time, journaling what we do is a means to bullshit test ourselves.

Input data

• We split our time between personal and work universes.
• (Actually this project doesnt care how you divide your life, but the first term, below, is a "core-category" )
• ...
• And furthermore we bring our attention to either specific Projects, which have a beginning and an end, such as the below taxes-2017--hopefully one day I will finish my taxes--and adhoc tasks which is meant to record time spent helping a colleague for example (here called consulting, below).
• routine is a potentially useful --or not-- distinction of things we do which do not have an End.

times 2018-02-10

10:00 - 10:30 ; personal ; taxes-2017 ; plan ; just starting out
10:30 - 11:05 ; personal ; routine ; yoga
11:35 - 12:20 ; work ; WRK-345-bugfix-foo ; code
12:20 - 13:05 ; work ; adhoc ; consulting 
13:05 - 13:35 ;  work ; WRK-345-bugfix-foo ; code

Output example

• Here is an example of an output stacked area chart of a core-category:work query, which is using the author's data from December of 2017. This uses the d3js so called stacked layout. The y-axis represents minutes.
• This chart is not labeled, but it is possible to see that some days in the week of December 4th had multiple competing interests, while the week of Dec 11th there was a bit more focus on the Purple project.
• This particular layout only allows for a max of 20 layers before colors are re-used for other categories.
• a lot can be said about stacked area chart aesthetics.

Architecture overview

Here's a super simple overview. There are several lambdas at play here, but the general picture looks like this.

• Here, crontab -l shows how an upload script runs every 20 minutes

# crontab -l

*/20 * * * * bash /path/to/my/local/repo/timesheet-parser/clojure-time/timeparse.upload.sh

• and the timeparse.upload.sh is a one liner that does...

sh -c 'source /local/path/to/my/environmental/variables.sh  \
  && source /local/path/to/my/python/environment/thing/bin/activate \
  && python /path/to/my/local/repo/timesheet-parser/scripts/upload_client.py  times /local/path/to/my/Dropbox/my/dir/with/time/data'

Can I use this?

This service has not yet been neatly templatized for easy adoption. This for now has been a fun side project proof of concept for helping the author figure out where his time is going.

Productionizing would happen of course given enough of a demand.