Time Tracking with Hackaru and Timeular

Keeping track of your time is hard. It is even harder to precisely report on what you have spend time. Working in the IT industry requires you to do precisely that. Report to your customer or manager what you have been working on the last weeks.

I always had trouble reminding myself to keep track of my time for various reasons. Mostly, because I emerge myself into a task and have a hard time perceive my surroundings. I almost always forgot to write down that I started with a new task.

I tried time tacking software like hamster and even plain Microsoft Excel sheets. However, it didn’t klick, and I always spend some hours at the end of the month with an attempt to reconstruct what I did when and how long. In the past two years, Covid ensured that my calendar was full and made those attempts pretty precise. But I really don’t want to go through this process at least every month. I needed a change.

Half a year ago, I stumbled over Hackaru. A simple time tracking software with all the functionality I need. Aside from synchronization with the software, I have to report with (Projektron and Zistemo). Hackaru has a simple and powerful user interface, you can look at what you have done in a calendar view, and it generates reports. It has a cross-platform desktop client, its web-version is a progressive web app, it is open source and actively maintained.

For some weeks it made a difference, and I was more disciplined with my time tracking. I guess this was mostly because I had a shiny new thing that I could self-host and that fitted my needs better than the previous ones. However, it did not take long until I was reconstructing what I have done at the end of the month.

My Timeular cube infront of my notebook

Things started to change when a colleague mentioned that he has bought the Timeular cube. To cite its kickstarter campain it

is a beautiful 8-sided device that makes time tracking instant and fun

This cube really helps me to keep track of my time. The concept is simple: You have eight sides that can be labeled and associated to a task. If a side faces upwards, the time for the associated task is active and if it rests in its stand no task is active. The unique selling point is the physical presence of the device. It does not occupy precious space on your monitor, but you can still see it all the time. The act of physically turning the cube makes it — at least for me — easier to embed in my routine.

Of course, you need software to make use of the cube. Timeular offers a time tracking software that nicely integrates the cube, but can also be used without it. I really like Hackaru and the fact that it is open source and can be self-hosted. Therefore, I didn’t really consider switching to the software from Timeular, which also saves me 70€ subscription fee per year.

The Timeular cube is a BLE device with a very straight forward interface and made it incredible easy to write a small program that connects it with Hackaru. Using the bleak Python library, it is easy to register a callback-function to changes of the orientation characteristic. The only thing left to do is to map the values [1..9] from the characteristic to tasks in Hackaru and start / stop them accordingly. After 1½ hours, I had my first working prototype.

I use this combination Hackaru and the Timeular cube for over a month now, and I am really happy. I revised version of my script hackaru-timeular is available on PyPi and can be installed via

pip install hackaru-timeular

Information on how to configure hackaru-timeular is available in the README on Github.

This is the first time I am really happy with my time tracking setup and I hope that I will never have to reconstruct what I have done at the end of the month.