Cattr - time tracking

[marcusquinn]

"Cattr is an open-source time tracking solution, designed to be flawlessly integrated with your infrastructure. Superpowered with features like built-in screenshot capture and activity detection, it's a great instrument to boost your team's performance straight to the top."

https://cattr.app
https://github.com/cattr-app

[jdaviescoates]

This sounds/ looks like a better solution that the existing Kimai package.

[marcusquinn]

Forgot about this but yes, FOSS alternative to what Upwork offers. I'll add to my wishlist. Might be able to sponsor but could do with a few others chipping in as I don't want to undervalue app-devs.

[jdaviescoates]

@marcusquinn said in Cattr - time tracking:

I'll add to my wishlist.

It was already there! (that's actually how I was reminded of it! )

Now you've got it there twice!

@marcusquinn said in Cattr - time tracking:

Might be able to sponsor but could do with a few others chipping in as I don't want to undervalue app-devs.

Feels like it's almost time to just go ahead start a Cloudron App Dev collective on Open Collective! (or wait for @murgero @atrilahiji to finish packaging Fosspay and use that)

[yusf]

Nice! I’ve been looking for a simple and decent looking time tracking tool.

Although:

For each employee, you can specifically enable screenshot capture and activity tracking for keyboard and mouse. These instruments will help you get insights about how good is workflow built in your company.

What in the holy mother of dockerwhale 🤯

I’d be quite hesitant to include and promote actual spyware on the Cloudron app store.

[jdaviescoates]

@yusf said in Cattr - time tracking:

I’d be quite hesitant to include and promote actual spyware on the Cloudron app store.

Yikes.

I guess could just not enable those features? Or even comment them out in the code or something!

[marcusquinn]

For interest, currently we use timecamp.com and I looked at activitywatch.net but couldn't figure out how to get it to work.

The killer feature for us being able to tag application window names, website titles and URLs for attribution to connected projects or tasks.

I haven't tested Cattr to see if it does that - be amazing if it did but I couldn't see that.

So it's a nice looking app to have for some uses, but in practice, I try to avoid anything that relies on human interaction for logging.

[marcusquinn]

Looked at Cattr again, anything that doesn't capture apps, window titles and urls is next to useless. So this is just here for the record not to bother.

[jdaviescoates]

@marcusquinn said in Cattr - time tracking:

useless

Perhaps for your use case, but I'd guess lots of people don't need that stuff. Indeed I know quite a few people who just use Kimai (the relatively basic time tracker we've already got on Cloudron)

[marcusquinn]

@jdaviescoates I guess I see active time-recording as unnecessary admin and distracting to have time as a metric on productivity.

I use these things to analyse what teams use, how much time they spend on things that we could save them from.

I started work as a team of 4, peaked at about 60 and now we've found a natural equilibrium at 34. What I learned from all that was anything above those initial single-figure days is impossible to fully understand at scale, but with the broader overview we can make better decisions.

Simple example being when to migrate an app, we can drill in, see if it's being used much and when, and time maintenance all without asking anyone anything.