Hi,

I think that ManicTime needs to have auto-tagging rules capability: once some program is activated (i.e., excel.exe), then some tag is automatically assigned for the period excel.exe is active.

Rules containing program and window names with wildcards would let us save a lot of time by not having to add tags manually.

I guess it would be fairly easy to develop.

Thanks for your time!

Hi there, I wanted to stop in to say that I just checked out MT and it is really great.

As for auto tagging, I came looking in this forum to see if anyone has brought this up, because it's essentially the only thing I can see as missing in the software at first glance. As some of the competing products have recognized, it is advantageous to be able to mark documents, folders and/or windows that should automatically be associated with a particular tag or some data structure that allows me to say "How much time did I spend on Project X?"

From a user standpoint, a use case that really resonates with me is being able to set a particular folder to be associated with a particular project and/or client. That would be a fantastic addition to an already great product. I very much like the way your software looks and the fact that the name of every Web page and document I have ever opened isn't sitting out on the Internet somewhere. That's just kind of creepy and, for my needs, it isn't worth it. Thanks!

Hi,
Thanks for your interest in my comments. I'm not sure whether you are referring to my first situation or the second, and since they are two different ways to give the same result, I will explain both:

I work at a place where I work on a number of different client files each day. Each client folder is currently organized as a subfolder of the particular client for whom the work is being done, with some additional folders underneath that represent different documents that make logical sense. Each client file is handled separate and apart from other client files.

When I am working on a particular project within a client file, I am usually writing and/or editing one document while reading or referring to one or several others in the same client file. Occasionally, I will need to incorporate the use of other documents in other client files and/or web pages into this workflow for additional reference information while writing.

It is necessary for me to track my time to complete the drafting and/or editing of the project document(s). This means more than just the time spent with the active window being the document I drafted. This must include the time spent researching and reading in the other documents in the client file and particular web pages. Since I may stop and start or switch projects mid-stream, it is not enough to be able to tag a 'block' of time as being associated with the project because 1) the time periods may be frequent but discontinuous, which means a lot of time spent tagging, and 2) the system should be able to track my progress on hundreds of different projects over time without getting bogged down (I anticipate that the SQLite DB is capable of this, I just haven't tried since the time required to input each period of time is not worth the benefit gained (see #1).

Rather, I suggest two different solutions that meet my circumstances:

1) Being able to choose a folder and whenever a document in that folder is open, associate the time spent with the active window on the document as being for the project. This has the advantage of being a 'set and forget,' but the disadvantage of not being able to easily target the outside documents and webpages.

2) Being able to target windows open windows of documents associated with the project once, and using the title and/or the process of the window to determine which project with which to associate the time spent in them. This has the advantage of being able to incorporate web pages and documents in any location, but the disadvantage of having to target each window.
It is also important of course, to recognize the slight variations that may occur in window titles without affecting what the window is actually presenting. For example, some applications may add a * to the window title when a change has been made, or a web page may change its title (e.g. Gmail when you have a new Google Talk message).

I believe that it may be effective to target certain applications for this behavior, since it is difficult, if not impossible, to generalize the behavior of window titles. Additionally, while not a problem for me since the client file number is in the file name of most documents I work on, some people may run into issues with files of the same name but in different folders. For example, a file Letter to John Smith.doc may appear in folder 0001 and folder 0002, but MS Word simply displays Letter to John Smith.doc in the title bar.
For this reason, I think that a few add-ins for popular applications that are likely to be used with ManicTime may be the best way to get the data you need to really track time spent without getting confused over window title changes. For example, I would imagine that many, if not most, people are most concerned about tracking time spent in business apps, such as MS Office/OpenOffice, Photoshop and other media editors, web browsers, etc. I am not familiar with Adobe's affinity to add-ins, but certainly a small MS Office add-in could derive information about open documents, and a Chrome/Firefox add-in could get information about websites. In fact, it would be really cool to be able to set some rules about what URLs/domains/regular expressions should be associated with what project.

I hope this is helpful in understanding my use case. I don't mind providing this information since MT is about 90% perfect for what I need. Thanks!

Along with combing data from multiple computer logs, auto-tagging is IMHO the most needed feature for ManicTime.

Auto-tagging could be based on programs or documents.

For programs, I would suggest a right click option when you click on a program which you can add or remove auto-tagging for that program (with options for multiple tags).

For documents, I would suggest auto-tagging based on search term filters.

Right now in ManicTime, I use a search term for a particular project (which captures file names/folders/websites etc for that project), then do "check all", then tag them on the tag timeline. This is basically what you suggest in the post above, and it works fine, it is just a pain to do this everyday, for multiple projects, and involves several steps.

So I would suggest a separate dialogue which lists current auto-tagging filters, which shows the search term and tag type, which can be edited, added to, or removed. You could add an icon next to the advanced search box to create a new auto-tag filter based on the current search term.

Also, the search entire database seems a bit useless right now. It needs the ability to tag entries - e.g. I search for a project name across all entries, and tag them from the search dialogue.

I would agree with the other posters that auto-tagging is the most important missing feature. The amount of time it currently takes is too much, so I'll probably not keep up...

Wim

I just started using MT yesterday after evaluating several time-tracking programs and am very impressed so far! I track time for billing purposes and having the ability to capture and aggregate small increments of time for emails, etc. is very valuable.

After reading through the forums and seeing how to use filtering as a sort of half-automated route to tagging, I'm finding that I can speed up tagging quite a bit. However, after tagging large blocks of project work by highlighting spans of time or using filters, I am left with a lot of untagged bits and would like a way to group and tag them more efficiently. For example, after tagging time spent on emails for several clients in Outlook, I want to quickly grab all of the untagged Outlook time and tag it as Misc. Correspondence. But I don't see a way to exclude time that has already been tagged from the filter/search functions. If I filter Applications on Outlook, I see by the colored bars to the left of results which are untagged, but there's no way to quickly select all of the untagged instances of Outlook use to apply a single tag to them. So my suggestions are 1) Add a "show untagged only" option on the filter bar or 2) add the ability to highlight a span of filtered entries using shift + click.

Also, it would be great to have an option (either as a program setting or in filtering) to ignore a app/doc when the window is active for less than x seconds (so that when you switch windows very quickly just to find the right window you aren't generating a lot of extraneous entries in the log).

I do agree that an auto-tagging function would be tremendously helpful - ideally one that allows the user to create rules based on applications and documents.

That was very helpful - thank you! I had overlooked those buttons and was clicking on the wrong area (near the checkboxes instead of the middle of the row when trying to shift-select, so it wasn't working.

Still hoping for rules-based tagging in the future, though.....

Another question: is there a way to keep MT tracking Skype as the active application for as long as I am on a call, even if I am multitasking, or even if I don't touch keyboard or mouse for the whole time I am on a call (MT thinks I am away)?

Thanks again for the great product support!

How about supporting LINQ queries as tags? ie.

from d in documents where d.Path.Contains "ProjectName" select d

...or just give me an API and i'll do it myself :P

I have been trying this software for a few days and I would like to second the request for rule-based automatic tagging.
Preferably with wildcards (*) (or even better, regular expressions).

Software that requires effort (tagging all the different activities) is software that people tend to stop using after a while.

The less effort required, and the smoother the use is, the more users you will have, I promise :-)

For that reason I am convinced adding automatic tagging is much more important than adding "expanding" features (that not even all users need).

By the way, I like your software the most of the 5-6 different ones I have tried.

Why Auto-Tags is a separate timeline???
How to create a Top Tags+AutoTags chart in Statistics?