Times & Tasks User Guide

Overview
Features
Getting Started
Adding New Activity
Recording Time
Saving Activities
Editing Activities
Deleting Activities
Generating Reports
Preferences
Miscellaneous

Overview

Times & Tasks is a time management and journaling application. It is designed to improve productivity by keeping track of the time spent on different activities. User can generate reports, export data to an XML file, or to Microsoft Excel.

Features

The following are some of the Times & Tasks features:

Activity operations are shown and controlled as standard table entries
Changeable table properties--column titles and positions, row heights and positions, background color for running activity
Easy activity setup, multi-choice field selections, easy time and date interval setup
Tabular report with real-time selection-total calculations
User data export to an XML file
User data export to Microsoft Excel
User data import from an XML file

Getting Started

See the Release Notes for how to install and start the application.

Activities are shown and controlled by the Activity Table. When the application is executed for the first time, it will include a demonstration activity:

Each column of the table shows fields of the activities. These fields have default column titles (shown below in square brackets):

Activity Name [Project] - the name of the activity, single line text
Activity Category [Task] - the category of the activity, single line text, multi-choice selection of known values
Description [Notes] - the description of the activity, multi line text
Start Time [Start Time] - the date and time when the activity started
Activity Duration [Duration] - total time spent for the activity, shown as hours and minutes

(See Preferences section to customize the column titles.)

Adding New Activity

You can add new Activity by pulling down the Edit menu and selecting the "Add Activity ..." menu item. Add Activity can also be activated via the pop-up menu. When the menu item is selected, a pop-up window as shown below will appear. Activity name should be entered to the Activity field and the type of the activity should be entered as the Category. For example, to add a new entry for project "Survey" and for the activity type "Report."

You can either select one of the existing categories, or enter a new one. The application will remember the new category (only for that activity.)

When the OK button is pressed, the new activity will appear in the Activity Table:

Recording Time

To record activity time ("starting" an activity), use the mouse to move the cursor over the table row for the activity and press the mouse button once. To indicate that the activity is now started, the background color of the table row will change and a small icon will appear at the lower right corner of the application frame:

(See Preferences section to customize the background color.)

Starting an activity will automatically stop any other running activity. You can run multiple activities simultaneously by changing the application preferences. To do this, you must pull down the Options menu and select the Preferences menu item and check the "Allow concurrent activities" checkbox.

When you realize that some of the time recorded on an activity needs to be transferred to another activity, simply click on the mouse button on the "source" activity, drag the mouse to the "destination" activity and let go of the mouse button. This drag-drop action will bring up a pop-up window. Type in how many minutes you want to transfer and press the OK button. (The "from" activity doesn't have to have all the minutes that you are transferring. In this case, extra minutes will just be added to the "destination" activity.)

Saving Activities

Activities that have non-zero duration time are saved as individual records to the User Data file. Once the data is saved, the record written to the file and the actual activity in the Activity Table will have no association at all--changing the attributes of the activity or deleting the activity will not impact the information in the User Data file in any way.

When the activity data is saved, the duration is set to 0.

The following actions will result in saving an activity:

Selecting Save User Data menu item from the File menu
Terminating application
Generating Report

(Activities with non-zero duration time are not saved.)

The User Data is saved in XML format. The following is a sample User Data:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<UserData uid="jill" version="1.0">
<entry>
	<number>1</number>
	<name>Abstract Love</name>
	<category>Script Review</category>
	<starttime>5/9/00 8:11 AM</starttime>
	<duration>1680</duration>
	<description></description>
</entry>
<entry>
	<number>15</number>
	<name>Red Leaves</name>
	<category>Audition</category>
	<starttime>5/9/00 1:11 PM</starttime>
	<duration>900</duration>
	<description></description>
</entry>

(Closing tags are not placed intentionally and the file is saved with .txt extension.)

It is strongly recommended not to edit this file with an ordinary file editor. If you want to edit this file, export the contents into an XML file using the Export User Data menu item under the File menu. Then use an XML editor to edit the contents.

The application stores the user data in the TimesAndTasksData.txt file (the User Data file) in the directory TimesAndTasksData. The User Data file name can be changed by setting the user.data.file property in the TimesAndTasksData.properties properties file.

As an example, the content of the TimesAndTasksData.properties file can be as follows:

user.data.file=/user/me/mydatafile.txt
user.data.file=c:\\tmp\\mydatafile.txt

The Times & Tasks application data is stored in the file TimesAndTasksData.ser. This file name can be changed by setting the application.data.file property in the application property file TimesAndTasksData.properties. Example:

application.data.file=c:\\tmp\\tt.ser

The application tries to locate the TimesAndTasksData.properties file, but the file location can also be specified by using the "-propertiesFile <newfilename>" command line option. Follow the standard Java platform conventions for setting these options.

Don't forget to backup the User Data file periodically.

Editing Activities

Other than the Project field (Activity Name), all of the activity fields can be edited--Task, Notes, Start Time, and Duration. To edit the field, double click the mouse button after positioning the cursor over the field. This will bring up a little edit panel as shown below. On the left side of the panel you will find an edit field to do quick, one line updates. On the right you will find a small button to activate a dialog window:

Task Field: The editor panel that will appear inside the table cell will include a pull down choice menu. You can either select one of the items from the pull down menu or you can activate the edit dialog window. The editor dialog will allow you to add, or remove Task entries. The editor dialog also provides a button to restore default values.

Notes Field: The edit panel has a text edit field and a button to activate multi-line edit dialog window. You must press the Enter key to submit the data that you enter into the single line text edit field inside the table cell. The multi-line edit dialog window looks as shown here:

Start Time Field: The edit field in the edit panel is convenient for simple changes. The edit dialog window allows entering the date and time using pull down choice menus as shown here:

Duration Field: The edit field in the edit panel will allow you to enter an integer number for total number of minutes. The edit dialog window will allow you to enter the total time as hours and minutes as shown here:

Deleting Activities

Activities can be deleted by selecting the Delete Activity menu item under the Edit menu. This will bring up the following dialog window:

You can also delete an activity by bringing up the pop-up menu over an activity in the Activity Table. The application will confirm the request before deleting the activity.

Generating Reports

Reports show the User Data in tabular form:

As shown in the above picture, a special capability of the report table is to show total value of the Duration column as you select the table rows. A small window (seen with yellow background in the picture) displays the total.

There are various ways of displaying the entries. You can either show all the data in the table, or filter the data in various ways as follows:

Activity Names Only: Entries with the same activity name are combined, durations are added, Task, Notes, and Start Time fields are not shown. Use the button
Activity Names & Categories: Entries with the same activity name and the same category are combined, durations are added, Task, and Notes fields are not shown. Use the button

The Duration of User Data can be displayed either in absolute values of minutes or in percentage values based on the total duration for all the records that are shown in the table.

Pressing the button will bring up a pop-up windows to select the date interval for which you want display User Data entries:

Preferences

The following properties can be changed:

Activity Table row height in pixels
Concurrent activities: By default, when an activity is started, any other running activity is stopped. If this box is checked, then multiple activities can run concurrently
Activity Table Column Labels
Background color of the table row for running activities

The Properties dialog window looks as follows:

Miscellaneous

Exporting User Data

The archived User Data saved in the User Data file can be exported as an XML document. This is done by pulling down the File menu and selecting the Export User Data menu item.

To export data to Microsoft Excel, in the Report table, select the rows you want to export, using the mouse buttons bring up the pop-up menu and select Copy. The contents will be copied to the system clipboard. Switch to the Excel application and paste the contents of the clipboard into an Excel page.

Importing User Data

The Times & Tasks application can import a user data from an external XML file. The external file must be in the right format (see section Recording Time), typically this will be a file exported earlier by the Times & Tasks application. The Import User Data action imports and appends data into the User Data file.

Terminating the Application

The Times & Tasks application can be terminated by pulling down the File menu and selecting the Exit menu item. Closing the main application window will also terminate the application safely (by first saving the User Data.) Each activity with non-zero Duration value is saved to the User Data file when the application is terminated safely.

An abnormal program termination may result in corruption of the User Data file. Therefore it is important to take backups of the User Data file. (Generating a report is an easy way to check if the User Data file is OK.)