Hi,

Reports for logged tasks and exporting them, has been the most coveted feature since the launch of LogMyTask. This update enables one to generate reports and export as CSV. Data exported as CSV can be fed to other applications. A simple use case would be creating nice charts in Microsoft Excel with the exported data. One can generate report for their logged tasks or for their teams. Reports can be narrowed down to a tag for a particular period. This could be quite handy in answering questions like: “How much time did I spend on facebook this year?” or “How much time did the team spend in getting trained?” Have a look at the options yourself and find out answers for those questions lingering in your mind. Who knows, you may find something for your new year resolution.

Cheers,
Team LogMyTask

Hi,

Time tracking is indeed a tough nut to crack. LogMyTask helps you to track time but many forget to log the task in the first place. We tried to solve this by periodic notifications over mail. What we noticed was that users find notifications over mail cluttering their inboxes & would either increase the notification intervals to the maximum or unsubscribe from them altogether. Thereby leaving LogMyTask no avenue to remind them when they forget to log. So, we were forced to find a non intrusive way of alerting users. How about a balloon at the taskbar reminding to enter the tasks at user chosen intervals? This gave birth to LogMyTask Desktop Client. Download it here. Its a tiny app running on Adobe AIR. You’d still find the same look & feel of the “LogMyTask on web” with this client.

Now, users who follow no teams have an option to move their “task history panel” to the right half of the screen.

This release also contains fix for some minor cross browser compatibility issues.

Cheers,
Team LogMyTask

Hi,

With the increase of our subscriber base we are seeing lot of users who use LogMyTask regularly. When you use anything regularly, you crave for more speed. One such request was to extend autocomplete to the tasks to make task entry faster. We heard it. Type in couple of letters & you should find relevant tasks from your task history. The algorithm makes sure that recent relevant task is given priority over the older ones. Once you select a task from the list, the associated tags are also filled automatically.

In a team, you would want to remove some users’ updates in the livestream to make room for others. With this release you can ignore the updates of such users.

Some minor enhancements are:

• In summary page the tags in legend show the no. of tasks associated with them, in tooltip.
• Complete start & end time is shown for tasks in both individual & teams’ livestream.
• We’ve introduced paging for the tags in preferences tab, so that users with more tags need not have to scroll a long way down.

We are very excited about this release, and hope that you will like it. We would love to hear from you.

Cheers,
Team LogMyTask

Why did we create LogMyTask (LMT)? This the first blog post from LMT team and I guess it is the appropriate place to answer this question.

I always wanted to use a simple web based time-tracking tool. I googled for a simple tool, but found that most of them are overly complex and have things like integrated invoicing, etc. I wanted something that is as simple as using Twitter. Something wherein I could just enter the answer to “What am I doing?” in a single input field and it would automatically do time tracking for me. I could use my Twitter account but most of my regular tasks would be mundane and not interesting enough to be a part of the Twitter timeline. Also, Twitter is not the right tool for time tracking. I would like to get statistics on how much time I have spent on a particular group of tasks. Lastly, I am a rather visual person and I would like to see my updates in a calendar view to get a quick idea on where am I spending time.

We quickly figured out that such a tool might be useful in a team environment as well. Let me give you a brief background on product development at my company Webyog, the creators of LMT. Webyog is the developer of several widely used MySQL Management and Monitoring Tools and popular Silverlight and WPF charting control Visifire. While we don’t strictly follow any particular software development methodology, we do borrow a few principles from Agile development. In particular, we have self organizing small teams (2-6 people) doing iterative development. We meet every two weeks to figure out what we should be doing (from our issue database) for the next couple of weeks. Once we decide that, each team member picks up tasks that he or she would deliver in the next two weeks. At the end of two weeks, we usually release a public beta of our product. Of course, we end up spending 20%-30% of the time on unplanned issues – usually bug fixes or support issues that require immediate attention. Note that we don’t decide the in which order would the team members execute their task. That is best decided by the person who takes up the task. At the same time, team members would like to know: What are their coworkers doing right now? Are they working on planned or unplanned issues? They would also like to get some statistics of how much time the team is spending on a specific group of tasks. Last but not the least, such data plotted on a calendar view will be absolutely fantastic.

LMT was created to address these specific requirements – time tracking at the individual level and Twitter style simple communication at the team level using a single point of data entry.

We could use time-sheets, but we hate time-sheets at Webyog. Time-sheets are not great for communicating in real time. Time-sheets are boring and people generally use them to fulfill the requirements of an organization wide process.

You might ask how LMT is different from some “Twitter for Enterprise” products. Yes, some of these products are great. They are just a bit complex for our requirements as they try to do a lot of things. We didn’t want this application to replace our existing communication tools. We are very happy with using phones, mail, IM and Skype for communication. We were blown away by Google Wave demo and we will probably use it when its available. No, we are also not suffering from Not Invented Here syndrome! At the time we started LMT, we couldn’t come across any product that provides Twitter-type simplicity for data entry and can still answer the following questions:

• How much time am I spending on a particular task?
• What is keeping me busy?
• What my coworkers are spending time on?
• What group of tasks are consuming the majority of my coworkers’ time?