People don't like filling in timesheets.

Some just find it distruptive and irritating. The more paranoid among us see it as some kind of invasion of privacy.

I know we all think we're different. We think our minds are unique, and the way we work isn't suited to time tracking. That's great, and I'm sure you're right, but at the end of each month your boss needs to know where your time went. It's very unlikely that he's trying to jam a stick in your spokes and distrupt your day.

Here are a few of the problems I've experienced:

• Traditionally, filling in a timesheet is a retrospective activity. You enter your time after a task is complete, or at the end of each day/week/month. This is disruptive. When I finish a task, I want to start the next thing straight away.
• Despite my best intentions, I never stick to my plan of filling in my timesheet as I go along. I get too busy, and I let it slip. It snowballs, and 3 hours later, I worked on 4 different things, and I'm not exactly sure how much time went to each project.
• Too often, filling in the timesheet at the end of each day relies on memory. On a good day that's fine, on a bad day, that's not so fine. I'm conditioned to rely on external tools to help me remember things. To-do lists, phone numbers, email addresses — these aren't things I find it easy to remember these days.

So, what's the solution? Well, I don't know exactly, but I've got a couple of ideas. Over the next few weeks I'm going to try out a few things:

• Log what I'm doing, not what I just did — The idea is to record tasks when I start them, not when they're finished. This should remove the need for me to remember anything.
• Log everything I do — I'll log everything I do during a working day, no matter how routine or trivial. This is as much an experiment to see where my time goes each day, as it is anything else.
• Categorise — I'll categorise every activity, probably through a basic tagging system so that I can report on my progress throughout the day/week. This will show me how much of my time can be billed, how much is routine activity, and how much is taken up carrying out personal tasks.

I haven't found a tool to do this that doesn't irritate me in some way, so I spent Sunday knocking together a basic Rails app that should do the trick.

It's nothing fancy, but it gives me a couple of things that should help me stick to the plan. Basically, I need to be able to pick the project I'm working on, enter the task, and tag it, all with my keyboard (my mouse slows me down), in a couple of seconds. The idea is to remove as much friction and interruption as possible and if it works, make the process part of my daily routine.

I guess I could just use a timer, but I want some automation. I want to have a report at the end of the day that shows me:

• Time spent on each project
• Time spent on each task within each project
• How much of my time was spent on billable tasks
• The effect of distractions during the day

Filling in timesheets is never going to be fun (despite the claims of several time tracking apps), but hopefully I'll be able to find a way that makes it easier for me to stay on top of things.