Not legally an Engineer Yet, Call me an EIT
Life every graduate student I’ve found it hard at times to make good progress without falling apart at the seams from pushing myself past reasonable limits, and ignoring healthy work life balance. It’s really easy to fall into the habbit, and it’s also really really difficult to get out of the habbit as people start expecting unreasonable amounts of progress at any given time. This can be made even worse when you’re responsible for managing hardware or equipment. If there are jobs that are too small to justify a full time employee, like managing a labs computers, but large enough to intermittently take a large amount of time without much clear progress, then you can find yourself working long hours, but struggling to find anything impressive to say you got done. Jobs like IT are notorious for being underappreciated because when you do them great, nothing goes wrong and everyone asumes that you’re doing nothing, and if anything goes wrong, people wonder what they’re paying you for.
Time tracking can be a invaluable solution to these types of problems. I am currently an avid user of clockify’s free plan: Link. I cannot bring myself to pay for such a simple application on a monthly basis. I’d happily pay $100 for the applicaiton to be able to run and host it locally. But I’m not paying a monthly fee when I don’t have employees to pay or a significant number of clients to keep track of. Converting the basic $4/month cost to a theoretical lifetime cost we get a get a generous low end cost of $960 which I think is frankly quite overpriced. I have well over 2000 hours tracked and so switching is a bit of a hassle, but looking into it there do appear to be some valid and useful alternatvies.
I may very well be making a switch over to this application. With it running locally they don’t feel the need to set a permanent cost to running the application. With the abiltiy to sync between machines using either cloud storage as the syncing medium or a self-hosted/ cloud-hosted WebDAV server. It honestly seems like a cheap and simple solution to the problem.
What I really like is the fact that they have an import feature. This is obviously mainly importing its own data and it expects a JSON format; however, it’s been a long time since that’d be more than a hickup. It’s an open source piece of software and so I may either, simply write a python script to convert between the clockify exported csv file, or I may simply write something to let it interact directly with the clockify API using a user provided API key. It’s open source so you can do that.
I may update this in awhile assuming that I do end up making the switch. Needing to setup a WebDAV server and all that may delay making the switch until I’m in a position to spend more time on the task.