Where Did the Time Go?

Like many of you the work day just seems to fly by. At the end of the day I start wondering what I really got accomplished and what I actually did all day. Well if you are willing to face the truth I have a way to help. Last year I wrote about a PowerShell module I called MyMonitor. As part of my ongoing effort to make some of my larger projects more accessible, I have revised it and published to GitHub.

The MyMonitor module works under the premise of keeping track of what window is currently active and how long it has been running. I can also extract other information using Get-Process that indicates the window title, the associated product, when the process started and when it ended. I include the processID as well, although that probably doesn't have any practical value.

The data collection process starts with Get-WindowTime. You can specify a time duration in minutes such as 60 minutes. Or perhaps you want to collect your usage data until 4:00PM. You can do that as well. One way that I use the command is with the ProcessName parameter. The concept is that you can start an application that you rarely use. When Get-WindowTime detects the process, it terminates collection. I typically use Windows Calculator as a "flag" process. Finally, you can run all of this as a background job so that you can get your PowerShell prompt back. Just don't close your session before you stop the job and collect the data.

The new version also includes categories. I created an XML file in the module with categories for different applications. You can have an application with more than one category. This adds another way to see where you are spending your time. More on that in a moment. When you collect your usage statistics, you'll get an object like this for each application.

data sample

The module includes a few cmdlets for reporting and analyzing the data.

Getting a summary report

Or you can use Measure-WindowTotal to slice and dice the data.

Measuring window time by application

Measuring window time by category

You can even get a bit more granular be filtering on text in window titles.

Measuring time by window title (Image Credit: Jeff Hicks)

All of the commands in the module have complete help and examples. There is also an About topic.

About_MyMonitor

The module is still a work in project. One of the items on the wish list is a better way to archive usage. This would allow you get a better idea of where your time goes on a weekly or monthly basis.

But for now, you can get the module source files from the repository on GitHub. I strongly recommend you read the About topic and help before you start using the module. Comments are welcome here but please use GitHub to report any problems or feature requests.

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