Time tracking

Track provides several commands to start, stop, pause etc. time tracking. They are explained in this chapter in detail.

• Projects
• Start
• Note and tags
• Status
• Stop
• Pause
• Resume
• Switch
• Time corrections

Projects

Each time tracking record is associated to a project. Before any tracking, a project needs to be created:

track create project MyProject

For more details on projects, see chapter Projects.

Start

To start tracking time on a project, use the start command:

track start MyProject

Note and tags

Records can have a not and tags. All positional arguments after the project's name are concatenated to the note text. Words prefixed with '+' are extracted as tags. Here is an example:

track start MyProject work on +artwork

Tags can also be key/value pairs, like:

track start MyProject work on +topic=artwork

Status

To check the tracking status at any time, use:

track status

It will print a summary of the running or the last record:

 SUCCESS  Record 2023-01-01 09:08
09:08 - ?
    - 10:25 - 10m / Short walk
    MyProject

work on +GUI +design
+------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
|          project |  curr | total | break | today |
|        MyProject | 02:05 | 02:05 | 00:10 | 02:53 |
+------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+

Stop

Command stop stops tracking:

track stop

Pause

A record can contain multiple pause entries. To insert a pause, use command pause with a duration:

track pause --duration 10m

This will insert a pause of 10 minutes, ending just now. After the command, the record is not in paused mode.

To start a pause with an open end, use command pause without the duration option:

track pause

Resume

To resume a paused record, use command resume:

track resume

The resume commands provides several flags:

• --skip to skip the running pause instead of closing it
• --last to resume an already finished record. Can be combined with --skip

Switch

To switch to a different project, command switch can be used instead of successive stop and start:

track switch MyProject

Notes and tags apply here just as with start.

Time corrections

For the case that you did not start, stop, pause etc. at the correct time, all commands described in this chapter have flags to correct time:

• --at foredates the command to the given time

  track start --at 14:00
  

• --ago foredates the command by the given duration

  track start --ago 10m
  

These flags are mutually exclusive.