You can see the Task Detection App as your personal time management analysis tool, which shows you how you spend your time and how it could be done more focused and efficient. It helps you to reflect about your past working days and how you develop over time. Everyone who spends most of his working time in front of a computer can use the app to optimize his time management.

IT consultants and sales people are the targeted end users in the first trial runs. Both consultants and sales people are highly self-organised and do not follow pre-defined schedules. Hence, efficient time management is important to their work.

This App will be available for download soon (Q1 of year 2012). It works on Windows (tested with Windows 7) and Mac OS X (tested with Lion).

Contact for this Task Detection App: Stefan Edler, Know-Center

Quotes from testbed partners or other testers/users

“The first step of time management is to analyse how I used my work time.”
“Our consultants know exactly how they should use their work time, on which project they should work how many hours in a week. The Task Detection App helps them to book their daily work time on the projects in which they worked today and it helps them to find out whether they achieved their goals this week.”

How it works?

The app consists of three different components:

• Data capture
• Data Analysis
• Data Visualisation + User Interaction

Currently, all three components are intended to run on the same device, but the “server” can in the future be moved to a separate device.

Data Capture: This component captures your daily activities and sends them to a server. This component needs no user interaction.

Data Analysis: This component is executed at the server, and analyses, aggregates and saves the captured data.

Data Visualisation: This component is a web application (runs in a browser). This is the part of the application with which the user directly interacts. The user can look at the data and edit it.

Below we describe how to use the App using Screenshots.

Figure 1: First, choose a day (in the figure this is November 10). Then it is possible to switch between two different views of your data – projects or applications. In the above figure, the “projects” view was chosen. Here, your data is separated into your different projects. In the above figure, the Task Detection App captured data from approximately 12:15 until 13:30. In the figure above, you see that the Task Detection App detected that you worked on the “MIRROR” project most of the time.  In the applications view, the activities are not categorized by project but by application. These views should give you a rough overview of what you have done your whole day and especially in which projects or applications. By clicking on one of the coloured blocks that show that you have worked on a project, you come to the detail view that is described in the next figure.

Figure 2: If you click on the coloured box that shows that you have worked on MIRROR from 13:16:58 until 13:25:08. In the detail view you see which files you have used in this time, and which applications you used to view them.

Figure 3: The above figure shows, that you were in the “application view” – to the left you see all applications that you used, and to the right above you see your activities categorized by applications. You have clicked on one coloured box that collects your activities from 13:25:07 until 13:30:27. In the detail view, you see which files you viewed in the Internet Explorer, and to which project they have automatically been assigned.
The app can’t record all your activities (e.g. meetings or phone calls) or you don’t want to save some private activities. That’s why we have included the possibility to add, modify or delete data.

Figure 4: In ordert o add or delete a resource block (a file that „belongs“ to a project or to an application block), select the project or application block in order to get to the detail view. Then, click on the small “plus” or “minus” at the bottom of the page. A dialogue window will appear. In the above figure, you add a resource that you used and think is relevant for this project block.