I did it for some time and I was using Rachota. Now I'm pretty happy with RescueTime, but as Neil, I rarely look at the timeline at the moment. Now I use such information to answer "what I was doing the whole week?" questions :) - Pawel Szczesny

I also used RescueTime for some time to get a feeling how much time I spend in which apps, but it can't really capture if I used TextMate to code for project A or B. Frequent check-ins as Neil suggested might be a good idea, though it'll won't capture reading / writing papers or emails. - Michael Kuhn

I wish for something that integrates with slife. - Daniel Jurczak

for me it's an absolute must to track time by project...otherwise I fear I would spend way too much time fiddling with details and wind up earning an average of 5$/hour. I use the web application 14dayz.com to track time by project, it's really nice and cheap (there's a fully functional free version for one person with up to 4 projects) - Louis Simoneau

I found it much easier when I was working to various production cycles, as they imposed an external set of deadlines by which time you had to get things done. Now, the demands come in from all directions (often unpredictably) and it is hard to prioritise, then track. - Maxine

@Michael, you could probably write a RescueTime plugin for TextMate, since there's already one for Firefox to say which sites you're on... - Donnie Berkholz

I guess you could spend lots of time writing stuff to track your time ;-) - Maxine

hahah @Maxine. For my freelance writing work I use a little application called (checks Dock) 'Timesheet'. In the lab...? PFFT! - Richard P Grant

I agree with Maxine, also in the lab there are many different projects, and you somehow have to prioritize. But without tracking, it becomes hard to say what you actually worked on the whole time... so I would like to have some sort of tracking mechanism that can tell me: "You haven't made progress on project X because you dealt with Y and Z." - Michael Kuhn

"You can only do two things a day, one before lunch and one after." said a famous German scientist. So I plan to do two important writing or programming tasks (no meetings or seminar attendence, no reading)a day, spanning about two hours each and use the rest of the time for to-do list small bits . That would be easy to track but I stopped doing that. - Roland Krause