Time Tracking Processing Part 1

This is a continuation of a series:

I’ve made some tiny changes to the logging output of my window tracking script (repository on GitHub):

  • Added a tab between the timestamp and window title so I can treat it as a TSV file
  • Split out each day’s logs into a new file

I’m starting with basic command line tools and will work my way up to adding on my own scripts when appropriate.

First basic question: for the first two weeks of the year, how many minutes were spent in front of the computer?

Using ripgrep with the -u flag because my log files are ignored by my .gitignore file to keep them from being committed to the repository:

cd logs/
rg -u 'no active window' | wc -l
> 14621
rg -uv 'no active window' | wc -l # -v for inverse, lines that don't match
> 5320

5320 minutes is almost 89 hours.

I can also easily find my most frequently seen window titles:

cd logs/
cat * | cut -f 2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -30

Explaining these commands:

  • cat * prints all the contents of all the files in the directory
  • cut -f 2 prints only the second “field” of each line, with tab being the default separator
  • sort sorts alphabetically, important here with uniq -c
  • uniq -c removes repeated adjacent lines, printing the total count of the line printed plus the number of removed lines. Thanks to sort, I know that the count here is global to all the files examined as identical lines will all have been sorted alphabetically adjacent
  • sort -rn sorts numerically “reversed” or in descending order high-to-low
  • head -30 shows only the first 30 lines

I’m not going to publish all of the output here, but these two lines at the top stand out to me:

 215 [Slack] Unread Messages - GitHub-grid - Slack
 182 [zoom.us] Zoom Meeting

^ 3.5 hours over the last two weeks just looking at my “All Unread Messages” view in Slack.

Personal goal: cut that in half over the next two weeks.