---
layout: post
title: Journal to Timesheet
date: 2017-11-10 06:43:05 -0800
categories: play
---
A couple tricks I use to keep a work journal and generate daily
summaries for my timesheet. Even if you don't need to keep a
timesheet, this is a good way to track your accomplishments.
<!--description-->
When I was a developer, I had to track my time in quarter-hour
increments. I never really liked doing this but, after 10+ years,
it's a tough habit to break. These days, the requirements aren't
quite as strict, but I still keep track of what I'm doing
throughout the day. It helps me show others what I've been doing
and it helps me understand what I've accomplished. This can be
very valuable, say, during scrum meetings or when I have to fill
out my timesheet at the end of the week.
## Journal
My journal is a simple text file that I maintain in Vim. Each
journal entry goes on one line, and each line follows a consistent
format. It looks like this:
```
1995-10-29 04:28 Back from jail! The feds broke my computer, but I
think Cereal forgot about the French fry incident.
1995-10-25 20:47 So, Crash is getting blackmailed. Weird. I gave
him some stuff I downloaded from the Gibson and now we are eating
pizza.
1995-10-23 03:32 Righteous hack! I hacked a Gibson and I have
proof!
1995-10-06 23:52 Nikon told me that hacking a bank across state
lines stupid, and now I owe Cereal some fries.
1995-10-04 02:12 Hacked a bank! I'm finally going to get some
respect from the guys.
1995-09-15 18:54 Thinking about a handle. Maybe ULTRALaser?
```
As you can see, each line begins with a date and time and includes
a short message about, in this example, what Joey Pardella was
doing in the Fall of 1995. I write my journal in
reverse-chronological order with the most recent entry at the top.
I do this, mostly, because that's where my eyes land when I first
look at a document. Unlike Joey, I usually have several entries
per day.
So that I'm not writing timestamps manually, I use this mapping in
Vim:
This inserts the timestamp at the beginning of the line and puts
me into insert mode. This is handy in other documents, too. When
I'm taking notes, I can insert a timestamp quickly. Being able to
see these timestamps can be very helpful later on.
## Summarizing
At the end of the week, it's nice to be able to see a daily
summary of what I did over the course of the week. For that, I use
the following script:
This gathers up the journal entries for the last five days and
prints them out as paragraphs. I can run this in the terminal (Git
bash, in my case), or from within Vim. Then I just copy and paste
the text for each day into my daily timesheet entry. If you create
your journal in chronological order, this script can be simplified
somewhat. In my case, because awk processes files top-down, I have
to accumulate journal entries, prepending, and then print them
after the date changes. If I were to treat this as a normal,
chronological log file, my summaries will appear in reverse order
within each day; it reads a little weird.
