[Feature] Support continous retroactive time tracking

[DaveDuck321]

Apps like SaveMyTime support continuous retroactive time tracking.

Lets say you wake up, study, waste some time, then go on a run.

1. You log "Sleep" as soon as you wake up
2. You log "Study" after finishing studying
3. You log "Relax/ Phone" after deciding to go on the run
4. You log "Run" after finishing the run

This eliminates untracked time and ensures the logging accurately represents how you ended up spending time (ie. if you got distracted and didn't do the timed activity you can just be honest when you log -- no need to correct it after the fact).

The limitations of this are that only a single activity can be logged at once.

[Razeeman]

Hello! I believe this would be same as disabling "Allow multitasking" in settings. This way when you start new activity previous one would be automatically logged. Correct me if this is not the case.

[DaveDuck321]

Sort of? It's the same number of clicks and the same idea of continuous logging. The difference being you say which activity you have been doing rather than which activity you will be doing. This improves the accuracy of the logs (at least for me) by avoiding scenarios where I leave the incorrect timer running after I switch to doing something else.

I know it sounds like a trivial difference but here's two motivating examples (caused by slight user error):

1 Say I've been working for an hour and check my phone, I would selecting "work" as my activity regardless of how may times I've checked my phone this hour. If I later found myself wasting time on social media etc, I could then select "phone" even though I didn't plan to do this beforehand.

In the existing system, since I didn't plan to waste time, the correct timer wouldn't be running and this would be incorrectly recorded as "work". In the proposed system, I can simply select "phone" whenever I realise I'm wasting time -- and assuming I logged "work" when I first picked up my phone, this would accurately capture and log everything.

2 I check my phone quite regularly when I'm doing Anki but very rarely when I'm exercising. If I forget to start the exercise timer, I would incorrectly log the entire duration (and have to guess the timings later).

However, the proposed system means that I can just select exercise whenever I next open my phone without losing too much accuracy (logged time = true exercise time + time since last log while I was doing Anki). Assuming I was checking my phone every 15 minutes during Anki, this would be accurate to within 15 minutes rather than failing completely.

[pat-richter]

@DaveDuck321 this is exactly what I'm looking for, and the reason why I've uninstalled this app before. But I did not find a good alternative.

Toggl can do, but while the UI is clean, it's complicated to do the correct clicks (since it's not their primary way for logging). SaveMyTime look ok, too. But 9 activities isn't much...

I've now seen that this is already implemented in SimpleTimeTracker! You can choose "Calendar View" in settings, and there will be an "untracked time" which you can assign (only visible when you switch to another tab or app and come back as it seems).

[jan-lehmkuhl]

Hi, i am using now this App in an retroactive manner. My only complain is the number of clicks to do so. My suggestions are:

• add a big Edit button in addition to the long press
• open the +/- menu by default or make it bigger
• Keep the "change previous record" setting from previous user interaction.
• show the activity choosing options from the main screen

Thanks @Razeeman for this great app.