Automatically tracking development time [closed]

Question

I'm working on a personal project and I'd love to be able to say at the end:"I've spend X hours on this project". Now one way to solve this, is to use a manual time tracker (worked from: to:). I've ran into problems with this, because I only manage to use it consistently for the first week or two. So I'd like to track development time automatically.

One idea I had was to insert a short script into the build process that that would insert a time stamp into a log file every time a build process is called. Later, I could analyze the intervals between each build and hopefully calculate a somewhat accurate picture of what's going on.

Does anyone else have an idea of how such a time tracking tool could be implemented?

Quick follow up based on the answers already provided:

1. Stop/start trackers aren't bad, but require a lot of discipline, something that I perhaps should be working on. But they dont work for me.
2. Specific app-tracking programs are great, but I'm current on Mac OS X.

Answer 1

My opinion is that you would greatly benefit yourself in keeping a light-weight development journal. Notes, sketches, times, dates, etc, designs. It's not an answer to your question, but it is a discipline that few developers have and one that they desperately need.

Life is busy and people must learn to track / budget their time and discipline themselves to take on good behaviors and habits.

I encourage you to fight and win this battle. Don't compromise something so easy to automation when there are greater gains if you improve your skills. You might also want to check out LifeHacker for some ideas.

A bit of a non-answer, but I hope you find it helpful.

Answer 2

If you use source control you can use svn (or any other) hooks on commit and checkout that log timestamps to a db, etc when you check your project out and when you check it back in.

The trick to making this work - and it is easiest on single developer projects - is to MAKE SURE you check your work in when you are done working for a period of time, and that you check it out immediately prior to doing actual work.

This might not be feasible for your project. Build process checking etc suffers from the same issues - namely that you might work for 3 hours and then build 8 hours after that.