Doing to Track What I’m Doing

A computer is in front of me most of every day, but I’m terrible at knowing what I’ve accomplished there. It’s a source of play and work (which is often itself a sort of play).

My platform of choice is macOS split with work in Ubuntu linux at the terminal. As a longtime “computer aficionado,” of the Apple variety, I found myself drawn to Brett Terpstra¹ for his amazing work on the platform.² One of the projects he has shared with the world is doing, a command line tool for tracking what you’re, uhm, doing.

I’ve had this app installed for years, but never really built a habit of using it regularly. My most recent career change requires me to be a little more attentive to what I’m doing where and how much time I spend doing it. Since I’m in iTerm2 so often anyway, I am overdue to give it a proper spin.

Once installed,³ just type doing now the thing you're doing and it creates a timestamped log entry. There are options for backdating tasks as well as annotating, archiving, tagging entries that can be accessed, exported, and shared in a number of ways. Used properly, which is my goal, doing can be used to accurately track your time devoted to each task.

For now, I’m studying up and sharing these possibilities with you. I plan to throw myself into using it for real next week.