Things have been busy at DigiLynx, and it's difficult to keep up with blog posts when there's so much work to be done!
After years in the industry, I've used a lot of tools for task and project management. None of them ever felt quite right, and I often found myself resorting to whiteboards or even paper to keep track of what needed to be done. At the end of the project, I knew there was a lot of hard work, but it wasn't ever clear exactly how much time tasks had taken.
Over the past month I've been using a tool to keep track of all my various tasks called Kimai. Kimai is a task tracker and digital stopwatch, and allows me to keep track of the tasks I've been working on down to the minute. It's not only helped me keep track of my hours for current projects, but has been a handy guide for estimating how much time I'll spend on future projects.
The very best part is that unlike many project and task managers, Kimai takes so little overhead over actual work. Go to the web page, click on the project and task you want to work on, and hit the start button. When you're done, hit the stop button, and comment on what you've done. Too many systems are so complex that people don't want to use them. Kimai strikes the perfect balance.
Kimai is an open-source web application, that can be installed as its own website or piggy-backed onto another. It can be used by an individual, or shared between a group of users. The project is still a beta, but there's a lot of discussion on the forums and the developers are quite helpful in tracking down any problems. I'd highly recommend it to any developer who loses track of time while working on a project.
