Now that I m
freelancing, I need to
actually track my time, which is something I ve had the luxury of not having
to do before. That meant something of a rethink of the way I ve been
keeping track of my to-do list. Up to now that was a combination of things
like the bug lists for the projects I m working on at the moment, whatever
task tracking system Canonical was using at the moment (Jira when I left),
and a giant flat text file in which I recorded logbook-style notes of what
I d done each day plus a few extra notes at the bottom to remind myself of
particularly urgent tasks. I
could have started manually adding times to
each logbook entry, but ugh, let s not.
In general, I had the following goals (which were a bit reminiscent of my
address book):
- free software throughout
- storage under my control
- ability to annotate tasks with URLs (especially bugs and merge requests)
- lightweight time tracking (I m OK with having to explicitly tell it when
I start and stop tasks)
- ability to drive everything from the command line
- decent filtering so I don t have to look at my entire to-do list all the time
- ability to easily generate billing information for multiple clients
- optionally, integration with Android (mainly so I can tick off personal
tasks like change bedroom lightbulb or whatever that don t involve
being near a computer)
I didn t do an elaborate evaluation of multiple options, because I m not
trying to come up with the best possible solution for a client here. Also,
there are a bazillion to-do list trackers out there and if I tried to
evaluate them all I d never do anything else. I just wanted something that
works well enough for me.
Since it
came up on
Mastodon: a bunch
of people swear by
Org mode, which I know can do at
least some of this sort of thing. However, I don t use Emacs and don t plan
to use Emacs.
nvim-orgmode does
have some support for time tracking, but when I ve tried
vim-based
versions of Org mode in the past I ve found they haven t really fitted my
brain very well.
Taskwarrior and Timewarrior
One of the other Freexian collaborators mentioned
Taskwarrior and
Timewarrior, so I had a look at those.
The basic idea of Taskwarrior is that you have a
task command that tracks
each task as a blob of
JSON and provides subcommands to let you add, modify,
and remove tasks with a minimum of friction.
task add adds a task, and
you can add metadata like
project:Personal (I always make sure every task
has a project, for ease of filtering). Just running
task shows you a task
list sorted by Taskwarrior s idea of urgency, with an
ID for each task, and
there are various other reports with different filtering and verbosity.
task <id> annotate lets you attach more information to a task.
task <id>
done marks it as done. So far so good, so a redacted version of my to-do
list looks like this:
$ task ls
ID A Project Tags Description
17 Freexian Add Incus support to autopkgtest [2]
7 Columbiform Figure out Lloyds online banking [1]
2 Debian Fix troffcvt for groff 1.23.0 [1]
11 Personal Replace living room curtain rail
Once I got comfortable with it, this was already a big improvement. I
haven t bothered to learn all the filtering gadgets yet, but it was easy
enough to see that I could do something like
task all project:Personal and
it d show me both pending and completed tasks in that project, and that all
the data was stored in
~/.task - though I have to say that there are
enough reporting bells and whistles that I haven t needed to poke around
manually. In combination with the regular backups that I do anyway (you do
too, right?), this gave me enough confidence to abandon my previous
text-file logbook approach.
Next was time tracking. Timewarrior integrates with Taskwarrior, albeit in
an only semi-packaged way, and
it was easy enough to set that up. Now I can do:
$ task 25 start
Starting task 00a9516f 'Write blog post about task tracking'.
Started 1 task.
Note: '"Write blog post about task tracking"' is a new tag.
Tracking Columbiform "Write blog post about task tracking"
Started 2024-01-10T11:28:38
Current 38
Total 0:00:00
You have more urgent tasks.
Project 'Columbiform' is 25% complete (3 of 4 tasks remaining).
When I stop work on something, I do
task active to find the
ID, then
task
<id> stop. Timewarrior does the tedious stopwatch business for me, and I
can manually enter times if I forget to start/stop a task. Then the really
useful bit: I can do something like
timew summary :month <name-of-client>
and it tells me how much to bill that client for this month. Perfect.
I also started using
VIT to simplify
the day-to-day flow a little, which means I m normally just using one or two
keystrokes rather than typing longer commands. That isn t really necessary
from my point of view, but it does save some time.
Android integration
I left Android integration for a bit later since it wasn t essential. When
I got round to it, I have to say that it felt a bit clumsy, but it did
eventually work.
The first step was to
set up a
taskserver. Most
of the setup procedure was
OK, but I wanted to use Let s Encrypt to minimize
the amount of messing around with CAs I had to do. Getting this to work
involved hitting things with sticks a bit, and there s still a local
CA
involved for client certificates. What I ended up with was a
certbot
setup with the
webroot authenticator and a custom deploy hook as follows
(with
cert_name replaced by a
DNS name in my house domain):
#! /bin/sh
set -eu
cert_name=taskd.example.org
found=false
for domain in $RENEWED_DOMAINS; do
case "$domain" in
$cert_name)
found=:
;;
esac
done
$found exit 0
install -m 644 "/etc/letsencrypt/live/$cert_name/fullchain.pem" \
/var/lib/taskd/pki/fullchain.pem
install -m 640 -g Debian-taskd "/etc/letsencrypt/live/$cert_name/privkey.pem" \
/var/lib/taskd/pki/privkey.pem
systemctl restart taskd.service
I could then set this in
/etc/taskd/config (
server.crl.pem and
ca.cert.pem were generated using the documented taskserver setup procedure):
server.key=/var/lib/taskd/pki/privkey.pem
server.cert=/var/lib/taskd/pki/fullchain.pem
server.crl=/var/lib/taskd/pki/server.crl.pem
ca.cert=/var/lib/taskd/pki/ca.cert.pem
Then I could set
taskd.ca on my laptop to
/usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/ISRG_Root_X1.crt and otherwise follow
the client setup instructions, run
task sync init to get things started,
and then
task sync every so often to sync changes between my laptop and
the taskserver.
I used
TaskWarrior
Mobile
as the client. I have to say I wouldn t want to use that client as my
primary task tracking interface: the setup procedure is clunky even beyond
the necessity of copying a client certificate around, it expects you to give
it a
.taskrc rather than having a proper settings interface for that, and
it only seems to let you add a task if you specify a due date for it. It
also lacks Timewarrior integration, so I can only really use it when I don t
care about time tracking, e.g. personal tasks. But that s really all I
need, so it meets my minimum requirements.
Next?
Considering this is literally the first thing I tried, I have to say I m
pretty happy with it. There are a bunch of optional extras I haven t tried
yet, but in general it kind of has the
vim nature for me: if I need
something it s very likely to exist or easy enough to build, but the
features I don t use don t get in my way.
I wouldn t recommend any of this to somebody who didn t already spend most
of their time in a terminal - but I do. I m glad people have gone to all
the effort to build this so I didn t have to.
My web pages are (still) in ikiwiki, but lately I have started
authoring things like assignments and lectures in org-mode so that I
can have some literate programming facilities. There is is org-mode
export built-in, but it just exports source blocks as examples
(i.e. unhighlighted verbatim). I added a custom exporter to mark up
source blocks in a way ikiwiki can understand. Luckily this is not too
hard the 
After more than one a year, a new minor FAI version is available, but
it includes some interesting new features.
Here a the items from the NEWS file:
fai (6.2) unstable; urgency=low
A new maintenance release 0.4.22 of 
The Rcpp Core Team is once again thrilled to announce a new release
1.0.12 of the 
This year was hard from a personal and work point of view, which impacted the amount of Free Software bits I ended up doing - even when I had the time I often wasn t in the right head space to make progress on things. However writing this annual recap up has been a useful exercise, as I achieved more than I realised. For previous years see