Doing - the REAL Time Tracker 5.31

Here''s a quick tour of Doing:

The list selection indicates what you are doing right now. When you walk into work you tap the project or activity you are starting on, and when you leave you click it back to ''Nothing''. During an activity, you may enter further details of what you are doing into the text-field below the list.

Suppose you forget to click the activity until you''ve already been at work for a while. Then you would want to wind the clock back before clicking the activity. You do this by dropping the pen onto the small clock symbol shown above and winding the minute hand of the big clock anticlockwise. You can also wind it forward if you already know when you are going to leave the office. As you wind, the selected activity and stint-note text change to reflect the time selected. Using the calendar symbol above the clock you can wind several days at once.

A typical week might end up something like this. When you poke a stretch of time, a bubble appears to tell you either the name, duration or stint note of the activity.

You can drag the boundaries around in time to change the duration of stints or delete one altogether by reducing it''s duration to zero. The zoom bar at the bottom always focuses on the time you last touched in the main view and allows adjustment to the exact minute.

You can see your daily, monthly or weekly totals for each of the activities in return for a single click. The "Something" line gives the totals of all relevant activities. Here, the "lunch" activity has been clicked to mark it as irrelevant. With the Export button you can generate a memo of this information.

Doing exports memos that you can copy-paste directly into your (or your client''s) existing spreadsheet or database, especially if it''s MSOffice-based. There are three basic formats to choose from, under which you can select, deselect or rearrange (by drag+drop) various fields. You can also determine which activities count as work, and report them under more formal names. The available fields include:

• Display name, either or both of two formal project names, stint note,
• Full date, day of week, day of month,
• Start and stop times,
• Duration and breaks in hour:minute or hour.decimal format.

With the settings tab you can create, delete, sort and edit activities. The colour wheel normally just shows the current colour but pops up when you click on it, while the pattern drop-down list offers lots of patterns for use in the see tab. When "Nothing" is selected the global options appear, including manual and automatic purge.