Activity Watch is great at tracking Efficiency (time spent working / total time).
But it’s not as good for tracking Effectiveness (output / time spent working)
(but for the purposes of this post, time spent working on most important work).
I might use “google docs” or “google sheets” but for very different purposes, and so I can’t tell for what exactly I have been using it for.
Which means I can’t analyse in the future what I’ve actually spent my time on.
For example, as you’re reading this, you probably have that one thing you should do that you aren’t doing.
Or some projects that are more important than others.
So I would love a way to track what you’ve worked on directly.
The simplest way I can think of to do this, is while on your desktop, you’d open AW, then on the “activity” tab you would change “current project” to what you’re working on right now.
It’s not perfect since it’s manual and you might switch between projects quickly (which is not ideal either way), but this way the current categorization would be separate from what you spend the time on.
This would allow for either filtering or a different way to visualise what your time is spent on.
I am not sure of any other way to identify what project is being worked on in the same app/tool/software (i.e google docs)
Workaround
The only workaround I have for someone looking to do this is to have a standardized way to name files, windows etc.
for browsers you can install an extension called “URL in Title” which lets you customize how your browser windows are named (and therefore tracked)
you can then name your projects as “[ID] <normal window/file name>|”
for example if you’re writing a book, you can make it “[BK]” then use that to categorize within AW for everything regarding the book
