Before we started working on Esquimo, we wrote a program, which would give us information about how much time we spend on a specific task. Initially, we wrote for our own private use. In practice, it appeared to be so useful, that we decided that it deserves distribution. Task Counter is a small applet, that counts time while working on a specific task. Built-in statistics allow us to assess such effectiveness with which you worked in a given day, how long you have been working this day, how many times you have been starting the work on a specific task, etc. It is a very useful tool for freelancers, who often measure their projects based on time spent on the engagement.

When the Task Counter is tracking the blue square in tray changes into red circle. You can turn on/off time tracking for choosen task by keyboard shortcut (default win+T) or clicking proper button on the top bar.

β€žIn practice, Task Counter proved to be a strong motivating factor to work. When every day I watched the statistics of work with Task Counter and it turned out that 23% is time spent on orders and the all rest is viewing videos on Youtube and listening to the music, somewhere is my head there involved an alarm bell, and I immediately promised myself that the next day may not look the same. Apart from the mere knowledge that something in the background records whether I actually work or not, makes me not running my browser or music player because I fight for the highest efficiency, which I compare in the evening with a friend, who also uses Task Counter and tonight definitely the same as me will want to boast an indicator of work efficiency.”

Task Counter starts counting the time from the moment you pressed the start tracking button to the further clicking, which ends the work time counting over the selected task. If during the time counting the user does not perform any action, then after 1 minute (can be changed in "Options") TC starts accumulating time of pause. On the basis of times calculated this way, the statistics are generated.

Statistics are divided into two areas – tasks list   and  times & ratios

Task list displays a list of defined tasks. Tasks are divided into current and archived. If the task is completed you should remove it (the trash icon), so it does not take place on the list of Task Counter unnecessarily and then it takes an archival status. In this part of the statistics on the left there are two buttons:

  • - changes the group of displayed tasks
  • - shows a bar chart for the task after moving mouse cursor over the row with a name of the task / after clicking on the row

Task list can be sorted by individual columns, clicking on the column name.
task counter - columns

In the part of times & ratios you can check the efficiency with which you worked on a certain date. Of course, measuring of the effectiveness is very conventional and is based on the fair use of Task Counter. Effectiveness is presented here as the ratio of registered working time on tasks to full time action of Task Counter for the day.

The top chart shows in the bars, respectively:
- total time of Task Counter work ( tracking mode + inactive mode )
- registered work time
- registered pause time
Move the mouse cursor over the bars in order to display the numerical values of the times counted on that day.

At the beginning your stats can be very scant, since you are only adding the new tasks and the calculated amount of time is small. Below you can see how the stats of TC work with a greater set of registered tasks and times.

Support of Task Counter is very intuitive and requires no further explanation. Simply - download and start to use.