Tagalog is a simple gnome/python app for keeping track of what you do with your time. Tagalog is designed to be simple to use and not distract you from your work.
When you start a task, click the tagalog icon in the panel and enter one or more 'tags' that apply to the task you're starting. You can use whatever tags you want, for example 'Meeting' or 'Phone support' if you want to track the time you spend in meetings or providing phone support, or 'Project X' if you want to track the time you spend on Project X. Separate your tags with commas. If you want you can add more complete notes for future reference:
Continue logging your tasks. Note that tagalog considers the end of each task to be marked by the beginning of the next tast, so if you finish a task without immediately starting another you should remember to tag the time between them, eg. as "nothing".
When you've been logging your tasks for a while, you'll want to to check out what you've been up to. There are three ways to do this:
Right-click on the tagalog panel icon and select 'Examine log'. Choose the dates you want to view log data for and click "View log"
To see how much time you tagged with each tag, right-click the tagalog panel icon, select 'Analyse log', select the dates you want to analyse data for and click "Analyse".
Some of the smartarses among you will be noticing that the time spent adds up to a rather long working day. That's because tasks can be tagged as more than one thing. Eg. the time tagged as 'meeting, project lazarus' appears as being spent both on having a meeting and also spent on project lazarus.
The log files are stored in a simple text format in a directory called '.tagalog' in your home directory. Feel free to (carefully) edit them or write scripts to analyse them as you see fit.
Taglog requires the Gnome desktop environment and python. At present downloading it requires subversion. To download:
svn co https://tubbs.trition.org.uk/tagalog/tags/0.5 tagalog cd tagalog sudo make install
You should now be able to add the tagalog applet to the gnome panel (right-click the panel, 'Add to panel').