I work for a large company doing system requirements and design. At the end of the week we are required to fill out an online timesheet with various activities (Primavera). Manictime is great at helping me enter that accurately. If that were my only need, I would have stayed with the free version. What I really saw as great potential of ManicTime is being able to help me schedule future work based on past experiences. We do work on several levels. There is non-release specific activities, release specific, and feature specific. It is helpeful to be able to tag, or structure tags, so that I could information on those levels.
On Friday, I go day by day, and do multiple filters in the application view. Usually I do a few quick filters to get the easy ones. For example, our features are assigned an easily filtered string (FR12345C). Many of the documents, e-mails, etc. have that string in it so I can tag them easily. I tag them with the activity (requirements, testplan, etc.), feature, and release. Sometimes it is easy to tag the activity because I am only working on a single phase during the week. Other times it is not as easy as phases overlap. Somtimes I can filter on an application (bottom right) to narrow things down (requirements tool is different than problem tool). I do this several times until the day starts getting striped with time.
Then I look where there are no tags and select that time to see what shows up. Sometimes I also adjust the timeline to zoom in an hour or two at a time as the lines are narrow. That often will give another searchable string I can use to collect some more time and tag it. Once I get to where there are only small chunks of time left, I select that time and tag it with what I assume I was doing just to fill out the day without spending time on the smaller durations.
A couple of things that help to avoid overlap is that I use the "Combined Groups" in the statistics and when I tag, I tag several at a time.
I can see how overlap and auto-tagging could be an issue. The obvious way to auto-tag would be to search on that feature string, and have it be part of a group for that release. A second set of auto-tags would be activity based with the requirements tool or a string like "L1", "L2" or "requirements" could be used to tag that. Auto-tagging, I think works only when you can keep the strings and tags separate from one another and combine them later.
For example, now I will do something like this....
Switch to Monday
Filter on "FR12345". See what I was doing.
Re-filter on "FR12345" and (L1 OR L2 OR Reqtool), select all, tag with "Requirements", "FR12345", "Release 9".
Copy the filter string.
Switch to Tuesday.
Paste filter.
Re-tag those.
Now I realize another string that may catch more.
Modify filter, re-tag.
Copy filter
Go back to Monday and tag what the filter catches that is new.
Go to Wednesday, .....
Sometimes it is easier to focus on a day and get everything before moving on, but the more complicated the filters get, the harder it gets to remember what you did to get all the time. If you bounce from day to day focusing on an activity, there is a lot of circling back and re-applying. When I see something on Friday's logs that would apply for the week, now I have to go back to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday to catch any of that time.
A couple of ideas that would help....
A view of untagged time would be great. Being able to drag across time and only have untagged time selected helps, but being able to see only those activities in the bottom left pane would make it easier to figure out what filters would help.
If the searches (bottom left or advanced), remembered past searches in a pull down, I could more easily go from day to day, or even week to week, and reapply filters. The filters that I tagged from are most valuable, but all attempts would work too. If you have ever used Wireshark (packet capture tool), it does this with its filters. Firefox kind of does it with its history.
Overlap is ok so long as you can filter it out, or determine a hierarchy from the stats view. For example, anything I tag with a feature is part of a release. I shouldn't have to tag it. I have not played around with the tag groups much yet, but I suspect this is close. I could envision where I set up tags in a hierarchy such as Release - Feature - Activity - sub-activity, etc. so I would get time tagged in groups.
For example,
10 Release 9, FR12345, Requirements, L2, Create
20 Release 9, FR12345, Requirements, L1, Modify
5 Release 9, FR12345, Requirements (untagged beyond this level)
35 Release 9, FR12345, Requirements (total - calculated)
7 Release 9, FR12345, Testing, Acceptance Test Plan, Create
5 Release 9, FR12345, Testing, System Test Plan, Review
9 Release 9, FR12345 (untagged)
56 Release 9, FR12345 (total - calculated)
Release 9, FRXXXXX, Testing, Acceptance Test Plan, Create
Release 9, FRXXXXX, Testing, System Test Plan, Review
Release 9, FRXXXXX, Testing
Release 9, FRXXXXX
Release 9
I'll try to attach a picture of what I have in my mind.
horvathcom attached the following image(s):
ManicTime Tags.png
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