SUBCOMMANDS: add Adds a new task summary Says when you will have worked all the hours expected within the given period done Ends a currently open task resume Resumes a stopped task last Shows the last task recorded first Shows the first task recorded note Adds a new note when Says when you will have worked all the hours expected within the given period edit Opens the job log in a text editor configure Sets or displays configuration parameters vacation Records vacation time parse-time Shows the start and end timestamps you get from a particular time expression truncate Truncates the log so it only contains recent events statistics Shows overall statistics of the log help Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

The 'job' executable allows one to maintain and view a log of daily activity. ```

NOTE

The examples shown here and throughout the job log documentation are generally the most verbose possible for the sake of clarity. They all have short forms, however, to save keystrokes. Instead of

job add --tag overhead --tag email Reading the morning email.

you can type

job a -t overhead -t email Reading the morning email.

You will probably find that long tags like this are irksome and reduce them as well:

job a -t o -t e Reading the morning email.

But if there is something you do frequently, the easiest thing to do is to give it a distinctive tag and just resume it:

job resume -t e

or

job r -t e

Suggestions

Pattern of Usage

If you have to keep a log of activity for billing purposes you often need to keep distinct bins for different accounts, overhead versus work for a particular client etc. In addition you may need to keep track of different projects or subcategories within a particular account. I find it useful, therefore, to a major category tag and one or more minor category tags with every task. Typically a non-overhead task consists of a major category, such as sb, a minor billing category, such as cs, and a github issue number. Then when I need to add items to my time sheet I type

job s -d yesterday -T o -T sb

first to confirm that I remembered to put everything in some major category bin. If this tells me there are no items, I have succeeded. Then I subdivide the tasks by major category.

job s -d yesterday -t o

I find this clears away the clutter so the task goes more smoothly.

If a particular major category I find it useful to eliminate things I've already entered.

job s -d yesterday -t sb -T 123 -T 124 -T 125

This makes it progressively easier to focus on the next thing I need to enter.

Keeping a TODO List

You can use the note subcommand to maintain a todo list.

Add the following or some variant thereof to a shell profile file, ~/.zshrc in my case:

```bash

add an item to the TODO list

alias todo="job n -t todo"

show TODOs yet to do

alias todos="job s -n -t todo -T done"

mark at TODO as completed

function did { local rx=$1; shift job tag -fnt todo -T done --rx $rx -a done $* }

show completed TODOs

alias triumphs="job s -n -t todo -t done" ```

Now (in a new terminal or after you type source <shell profile file> ) to create a todo item you type todo <what should be done>.

To list today's todo items you type todos.

To list all todo items ever you type todos ever; for all this week, todos this week; for yesterday's, todos yesterday; etc.

To cross a particular item off the list you type did <some word unique to today's item>. The thing after did is interpreted as a regular expression. Only the first todo item in the given period whose description matches the regular expression will be marked as done. If you need to mark something as done which you didn't add today you need to provide the appropriate period. E.g.,

did something yesterday

Here is a screencast of some todo list manipulation.

Installation

To be ensured the latest version, one needs to use cargo:

cargo install jobrog

There is also a homebrew tap:

brew install dfhoughton/tap/jobrog

Changes from App::JobLog

For the most part the features of jobrog are a superset of those of App::JobLog. There are some differences, though:

• You can mark when repeating vacation intervals go into effect or become inactive. If you use this feature however, or if you add a new repeating vacation interval, your vacation file will no longer be readable by App::JobLog. This feature adds two colon-delimited timestamps to the end of the relevant line. This is the only breaking change I know of.
• There is optional color!
• There is a first subcommand parallel to last.
• The today subcommand has been subsumed into summary, which now has "today" as its default period.
• There are fewer compression options for the truncate subcommand in the interest of simplicity.
• The filtering options for summaries behave somewhat differently and are, for me, more useful.
• You can round up, round down, or "round center" the durations for lawyer-billing, saint-billing, and ordinary-shmoe-billing modes.
• You can configure jobrog to use fractional hour precision, like quarter and half.
• You can obtain summaries as line-delimited JSON as well as tabulated text.
• The merging and display of summary information is considerably less configurable.
• There is a statistics subcommand if you want a quick overview of a time period.
• There is no modify subcommand.
• The tags subcommand adds or removes tags instead of listing them.

Why Rewrite App::JobLog?

• Everyone's doing it!
• Rust is fun!
• The Rust version is perceptibly, and in some cases usefully, faster.
• My Perl skills were in little demand and thus becoming rusty.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank

• my wife Paula, who has been the only consisten user of Job Log other than myself over the past ten years or so
• my son Jude, who helps me debug stuff and proded me to get back on task when I was letting the JobLog rewrite lie fallow
• my co-workers, who humor me when I talk about JobLog and then go back to using other mechanisms to keep track of their time