Time tracking

A kanban board with time tracking built in.

Most people who track time run two tools: a board that says what the work is, and a timer that says how long it took. Kaniban is one artifact. The timer is on the card, the card is on the board, and the board can add it all up.

The timer on the card

• Start it on the card. The running card is the one thing on the board allowed to move, so you can see from across the desk what you are meant to be doing.
• Pause it, and the run is kept. Each stretch becomes a session on the card, listed with the others and summed into a total. The history is on the work, not in a separate log.
• It is a start time, not a stopwatch. A running timer is stored as the moment it started, and the elapsed time is worked out from the clock whenever the card is drawn. Close the tab, put the laptop to sleep, come back: it counted the whole time.
• Nothing is sent anywhere. Sessions are part of the board, and the board stays on your device.

Where the hours went

The summary view, on Supporter and above, is what the timers are for. It shows a heatmap of hours, how the last thirty days moved, and how much room is left before the due dates, for one board or for all of them at once. Plus takes it further: cycle time, or how long a card takes from creation to done; effort, the hours each card actually absorbed; and rhythm, the times of day you really work, which is rarely the times you think.

A code on every card

Each card gets a short code when it is made, such as LNCH-014, and keeps it for life. A session therefore belongs to something you can find later: type the number into the command deck and the card is there, with its hours. Rename the title as often as you like; the code does not change.

Who this is for

• Freelancers billing by the hour, who want the hours recorded where the work was done.
• Students who want to know how long the essay really took, not how long it felt.
• Anyone curious where the week went, which the heatmap answers without being asked twice.

Getting the numbers out

Export writes the whole board to one file, and every session is in it as plain JSON: which card, when it started, how long it ran. There is no invoice generator and no PDF report; the summary shows the hours on screen, and the file holds them in a form any spreadsheet or script can read.

Questions