Text Files (Score 1)

I find it's very effective to use a good old fashioned lightly structured text file.

I hop around a lot as well when I'm at work. Some days I'm in meetings all day (not good!) or coding in my home office for a solid 8-10 hours. I find I'm almost always near my PowerBook, on which I generally have a text editor open (don't ask which one, since I don't want to stir up a text editor debate!). I simply enter my entries in a single line like this:

2005-12-18 0110-0135 Read /. and posted comment on time tracking technique.

If the line wraps, I let it wrap. I don't try to do paragraphs, since what I'm writing should be just a simple summary of what I did for the time slice.

If I'm travelling to a client site, I enter this for mileage:

2005-12-20 11 Miles. Visit to client xyz.

If the Powerbook's not around, I have a smartphone, and I email myself a line similar to these, which I can just filter and process with a nice little script, followed with '>> log.txt'.

And of course I can use the usual *nix text processing tools to do all sorts of nice things. Tax time sees something like

grep [Mm]iles log.txt

the results of which get fed into a spreadsheet for the accountant. Plain text and *nix tools are our friends! :-)