When working on projects with a fixed budget you will for sure recognize the time registration need. @GOYELLO we use our Redmine Project Management Environment to register time. Unfortunately, it is very boring and time consuming job. The good news is that we found a way to maximally simplify the time registration process by developing one simple tool…

What kind of stuff you have to do today?

We decided to use Stuff To Do plugin which was developed by Eric Davis. The plugin architecture allows us to improve it without changing the Redmine core. Eric Davis’ version enables people to define what kind of tasks they have to do today. We wanted to add start/stop timers for every specific task. You can download our adjusted plugin here.

When to use the hour registration plugin?

There are several situations when you could use this plugin:

• You have to register time on tasks that are very small (few hours).
• You have to switch between tasks very often.
• You tend to forgot how long you were working on a specific task.

How to use it?

Next to each task you have following list of buttons:

The first button (green) starts the timer for a specific task. Pressing it the start button will disappear. The first button in line now is the one responsible for registering your time (pen). After pressing it you will see a small window where you can register your spent time.

Other buttons are responsible for canceling the time registration and for moving your task back to a list of available tasks.

Power buttons!

There is one very neat functionality. We call it Mass Time Log.  This is a special button which you can use for registering all tickets in one click. It is very useful when you want to finish your work. Then you just press this button and you will see one screen with all things you did today. Just fill the fields and press save. An example screen is presented below.

The second power button we call Coffee Break. When you want to have a break, you can press this button. It will pause the timer.

What we achieved by this plugin

Currently we test this tool in our company. Several people are pleased with it. Soon the others will follow! I will keep you posted! Till that time, please share your opinion about this plugin with us by commenting below. We can also meet and discuss on Twitter via @GOYELLO.