Efficient Time Management Inspired by Hamsters and Gnome
I’m a sucker for cute animals, so I may be biased here. One of my favorite utilities lately has been Project Hamster, a time tracker for the Gnome Desktop Environment. Normally I log my development hours in a simple ascii text file, together with the rest of my project’s log, like so:
2010/02/18 Worked on User Access
HOURS: 9 [9:00 - 18:00]
- details details details
- details details details
However, such a project log is really only a solution for one thing. Gnome’s Project Hamster is an actual application that will do the tracking for you. You simply enter your current activity into the box, and hit enter — it stops logging hours for that entry when your computer is either idle or you’ve clocked “stop tracking”.
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Added Efforts & Semantic Benefits
Using the specified format below can make your overviews more immediately relevant. The specified syntax is:
activity @ subject, details about this particular activity
Although activity is the only necessary field to make an entry, keep in mind that the more information you enter the better a tool Hamster can be for you. Notice how my data below allows for an aggregated view of my activities. This is purely because I’ve been using the @subject specifier. Specifically, take a look at the bar graph in shades of pink. You can see that after just a few days working with Hamster I can already tell whether I’m spending too much time socializing, not enough time on school work or too much time working. These aggregates will probably be more useful as time passes, but I think the benefits to time management here are quite clear.

However, benefiting from these overviews will require diligent use of the application.
A Cohesive Environment Thanks to Scripting
Though I may love the convenience and efficiency of the Hamster applet, I’m continuing to hand-write my plain ascii logs for their thoroughness. I’d prefer to not have my stuff spread around: time logs for a job stored in Hamster but notes about the job in the ascii logs. This is where scripting comes to the rescue. I found that the community developers have already started working on command line access to hamster (which will make scripting easier) but I haven’t a clue what the status is. Such command line access will allow me to write a quick script to extract new hours logged for work, and append them to my project files.
Until Then: Eye-Watering Cuteness

Photo by: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pmaas
Even without command line access, I think most people who work on their computer will benefit from Hamster. If not because the application is useful, then because they’re spending more of their time thinking of cute little animals. Until a command line interface is written, I’ll either continue hand dragging times into my project logs or I might break down and just write my own script to extract Hamster’s data manually. Either way, I’ll post here when my work-flow is automated and share the experience.
I don’t believe Hamster comes with Gnome by default, but its another simple install from the command line:
apt-get install hamster-applet



You may be asking yourself how I’ve even come to need such a hack. Well, firstly: its a hack so there’s probably another 99 approaches that I could take, but this ones mine. Secondly: good question! Let me explain what I’ve been up to that involves such a care for CSS. I’ve been falling in love with hand-coding standards compliant xHTML and CSS. I’ve been coding a new website to serve as my future home on the inter-webs (don’t hold your breath, though). Building this new site is serving a few purposes: education/experience, plain old fun, and a chance to live without a database. For the seed of inspiration, see 