parti-time is a tool for partitioning timelines and tracking your time in plain text.

Partitioning implies:

• no undeclared gaps
• no double booking
• 1 single timeline
• strict order

Otherwise keeping a partitioned timeline is similar to classical time-tracking. People use it to remember and document how long they've been working on which projects and occupations.

parti-time enables users to

• keep their timeline in plain text
• create reports about their working hours

Status quo:

• tl file based reporting
• editor support for tl files in emacs and vi
• Google Sheet append

2024-Q2:

• tl lenses: Separate storage from tl editor view
• tt-like command line operations

post 2024-Q2:

• Web App
• Tightly scoped access tokens for untrusted customer devices

tl has been designed to be

• concise
• precise
• human-editable with ease
• human-readable
• simple to parse
• visually clean

Here is a sample day's declaration as timeline:

2019-08-12
0545 Customer X 2019-08
     Some Task
0700 Metamorphant
     Proof-Reading Metamorphant Blog
0745 Customer X 2019-08
     Development of Blarz, Interesting other stuff
1130 Private
     Lunch Break
1200 Customer X 2019-08
     Architecture Whiteboard Session, Incident Blubb
1545 Private
     Reading Awesome Clojure
1615 Customer X 2019-08
     Decision draft Project Y
1730 Private

In src/itest/resources/examples/v2_tl/TimeTracker.sample.tl you find a complete 2-day tl sample.

• Download the static release binary from https://github.com/JohannesFKnauf/parti-time/releases
• Store it in your PATH, e.g. in ~/bin on Ubuntu Linux
• Highly Recommended: Create a symlink or alias pt

For all CLI commands tl files, tt files and yaml files can be used interchangeably. You specify the format using the --input-format option. The default format is tl.

pt projects --input-format yaml src/itest/resources/examples/v1_yaml/TimeTracker.sample.yml

"Customer X 2019-08" 19.25
"Customer Z 2019-08" 1.0
"Metamorphant" 1.5
"Private" 14.5

Reports a summary of hours booked per project. Unsorted. This is used for basic cross-checks.

pt invoice-report src/itest/resources/examples/v2_tl/TimeTracker.sample.tl "Customer X 2019-08"

2019-08-12,05:45,17:30,01:45,10:00,"Some Task, Development of Blarz, Interesting other stuff, Architecture Whiteboard Session, Incident Blubb, Decision draft Project Y"
2019-08-13,05:45,16:15,01:15,09:15,"Roadmap planning, Legacy Stack Analysis, Visualisation of Dependencies, Monitoring stack, Log shipping Integration"

pt invoice-report creates a CSV report with a daily summary of booked times on a selected project. The report satisfies the usual german Gesetz über die Durchführung von Maßnahmen des Arbeitsschutzes zur Verbesserung der Sicherheit und des Gesundheitsschutzes der Beschäftigten bei der Arbeit (Arbeitsschutzgesetz - ArbSchG) conditions. This is typically demanded for consulting projects with a labor leasing time & material contract model (cf. Gesetz zur Regelung der Arbeitnehmerüberlassung).

Rules typically involve

• Start time on that day is visible (has to be >11h after the last day's end time)
• End time on that day is visible
• Total sum of pauses is visible (has to be >30m per day for adults)
• Total work time is visible (has to be <10h per day)

The list of occupations is meant as a reminder for the involved parties about the work involved.

pt timesheet src/itest/resources/examples/v2_tl/TimeTracker.sample.tl

2019-08-12,05:45,07:00,,Some Task,Customer X 2019-08
2019-08-12,07:00,07:45,,Proof-Reading Metamorphant Blog,Metamorphant
2019-08-12,07:45,11:30,,"Development of Blarz, Interesting other stuff",Customer X 2019-08
2019-08-12,11:30,12:00,,Lunch Break,Private
2019-08-12,12:00,15:45,,"Architecture Whiteboard Session, Incident Blubb",Customer X 2019-08
2019-08-12,15:45,16:15,,Reading Awesome Clojure,Private
2019-08-12,16:15,17:30,,Decision draft Project Y,Customer X 2019-08
2019-08-12,17:30,05:45,,,Private
2019-08-13,05:45,07:00,,Roadmap planning,Customer X 2019-08
2019-08-13,07:00,07:45,,Reading Wonderful Clojure,Private
2019-08-13,07:45,11:30,,"Legacy Stack Analysis, Visualisation of Dependencies",Customer X 2019-08
2019-08-13,11:30,12:00,,Lunch Break,Private
2019-08-13,12:00,16:15,,"Monitoring stack, Log shipping Integration",Customer X 2019-08
2019-08-13,16:15,17:00,,Phone call with customer Z,Metamorphant
2019-08-13,17:00,18:00,,"Automated DEV host setup, Build pipelines",Customer Z 2019-08

The timesheet feature generates a report that follows the usual format of classical timesheets, i.e. is time-slice oriented.

• Install Oracle GraalVM >= 22+36.1
• Setup an environment variable GRAALVM_HOME pointing to your graalvm installation (e.g. in your ~/.bashrc), e.g.

export GRAALVM_HOME="${HOME}/graalvm-jdk-22+36.1"

lein test

lein native-image

Create a sample Google spreadsheet and get its spreadsheet ID.

lein uberjar
${GRAALVM_HOME}/bin/java -agentlib:native-image-agent=config-merge-dir=src/main/resources/META-INF/native-image -jar target/parti-time-*-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar download --google-sheet-id "1qpyC0XzvTcKT6EISywvqESX3A0MwQoFDE8pxBll4hps"
${GRAALVM_HOME}/bin/java -agentlib:native-image-agent=config-merge-dir=src/main/resources/META-INF/native-image -jar target/parti-time-*-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar append --google-sheet-id "1qpyC0XzvTcKT6EISywvqESX3A0MwQoFDE8pxBll4hps" --input-parti-file src/itest/resources/examples/v2_tl/TimeTracker.sample.tl

Create a native-image and remove the Clojure libraries that appear in the error messages.

lein native-image

As of now, there are only predefined reports. They are not nice and beautiful, either.

We consider this a major limitation and envision something like a report query language to create arbitrary reports in a crosstab-like fashion.

As of now, all times are limited to local times of a single timezone. There is no handling of different timezones, switching timezones etc. No time travel, as well.

parti-time has been featured in

• blog article https://metamorphant.de/blog/posts/2019-11-27-parti-time-plain-text-time-tracking-for-nerds/

In src/itest/resources/examples/v1_yaml/TimeTracker.sample.yml you find a 2-day sample v1 time partitioning. You won't need it, except if you have legacy files that you want to convert to a new format.

v1 YAML timelines are deprecated and will be removed in future versions. Use pt convert to migrate.