Adding more functional to work with projects/customers/tasks

Alexander_Kravets · March 17, 2020, 3:40am

Hi everyone!

I really like AW application, it is cool!
I hope that I can share some of my ideas to help the community to improve the AW.

So here are the ideas (most of them connected somehow):

add model of Customer
add model of Project
add model of Task
realize functional to allow user work with customers, tasks and projects.

For example, let’s say our user is freelancer and he/she has three customers C1, C2 and C3. Our user is currently working on 4 projects: P1(C1), P2(C2), P3(C2) and P4(C3). Each of the projecs has it is own tasks inside.

It would be nice to let the user create such model items as Project, Customer and Task over the existing functional. With this functional and extended stopwatch module user will be able to move all his/her current Tasks to the AW and divide them by the Projects they related to. I think it is quite convenient to have one single app that allow you to track actvity and manage tasks. Project abstraction nice to have, since we can then set different billable rates per project. Customer abstraction can help during creation of automatical invoices or something like this.

If I got it correctly AW is more like individual actilvity tracker not the business app. But with adding some more functional we can easily extend it to the bussiness cases too. Actually for the complete business usage would be nice to have such abstactions as Team, Role, Customer, Project, Task, [Report, Budget, ConfigurableDashboard, etc.].

Personally I found these features very useful and probably I might help with the realization of them.

johan-bjareholt · March 17, 2020, 1:16pm

Correct, we are starting with a activity tracker for personal use as that’s the initial reason why we created it and because it has simpler use-cases. Once we find this use-case to be mature and reliable we are considering trying to adapt it to business use-cases.

To be able to manually report what you have been working on during the day with the help of the tracked activity is an idea we’ve had and the current way we’ve considered how to implement this.

github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch

Implement reporting

opened 08:03PM - 15 Sep 18 UTC

ErikBjare

!pinned area: analysis improves: sustainability phase: planning priority: medium type: enhancement

Reporting is the requested "enterprise feature" that we could provide. Since thi…s is basically only used in a company/consultancy or enterprise environment perhaps there is a way to earn some money by developing it exclusively for paying customers? ## TODO - [ ] Add a menu item to aw-webui called "Reporting" that just shows a "Coming soon" page with a form to fill out interest. - Form should contain questions about willingness to pay and number of reportees. ## Problem ActivityWatch already has usage within companies and is then usually set up as a single server to which many clients report (see for example this [60 client setup](https://forum.activitywatch.net/t/operationalerror-database-is-locked/164)). This has vast privacy issues and is not an acceptable solution in the vast majority of cases as it has a high risk of being misused for involuntary, covert, or straight illegal employee surveillance. ## How it could work Users could whitelist which activities (or categories of activities) to report, only letting the employee what work-related things were done. This would be a great start. ## You can vote on this feature [on the forum!](https://forum.activitywatch.net/t/reporting-timesheets-enterprise-use/306)

Not sure what I think about reporting on a task level though, I have a hard time seeing how to be able to report that efficiently. Doing it automatically would be hard to make accurate and doing it manually would probably be very inefficient. On a project/customer level though is a very good idea.

ErikBjare · March 17, 2020, 9:55pm

We will probably not be adding models for business abstractions such as customers/projects/tasks, as that is overly specialized and would add a lot of complexity for something that is already available in many business-focused ActivityWatch alternatives. Much of the same thing can already be achieved using categorization, and could work even better with minor modifications to how categorization works, such as having arbitrary sets/types of categories that one can switch between (one for customers, one for projects, etc), which we’ve been thinking of building anyway.

Try to imagine a solution that doesn’t rely on too many assumptions about the use-case (so that it’s useful to a wider group of users) and which leverages existing code (to minimize complexity), then it’d become interesting and would have a chance to get implemented.