TimeTagger: simple, pain-free, self-hosted time tracking

I’ve been trying to be more mindful about tracking the time I spend on each project. For some reason I first landed on Time Tracker, a local Linux app. It did the job, and there was a way to sync my logs, but being Linux-only was problem, because of that I was never disciplined about actually tracking my time. The UI had its own issues too: starting and stopping a timer is easy, but trying to get an overview of anything more than a single day is confusing and never figured the correct way to do it.

Recently I decided to look for something better. I knew about Kimai but it didn’t fully convince me. Digging through Reddit I found TimeTagger, and it’s honestly amazing it its simplicity. It doesn’t try to be a feature-complete solution like Cattr or Kimai, instead it does what it sets out to do really well: simple and understandable UI; hashtags to track tasks and projects; a built-in pomodoro; simple and clean reports.

Self-hosting it is really easy: you can either install and run the pip package or use the official Docker image. I went with the pip package myself. And since TimeTagger exposes a REST API, I was able to import all my old Time Tracker logs easily.

TimeTagger is perfect if all you want is simple, pain-free time tracking. I may give Cattr a try in the future, since it looks like the most feature complete FOSS alternative. But right now TimeTagger just does the job of helping me track my time, and it does it really well.