(Official homepage at interrupttracker.com)

Please note: This codebase was a quick hack that got out of hand. I was also pretty new to Scheme at the time. It's been rewritten twice over the years. The current version is now in Raku and can be found here. The latest version supports Time Tracking too. Not just Interruption Tracking.

This has been updated to work with Chicken 5, but I'm not using this version anymore so I'm not guaranteeing anything ;)

Hey

"Hey! I've got a question."
"Hey take a look at this."
"Hey!"

Sound familiar?

Interested in tracking just how many times you're interrupted and by who?

Well hey, maybe hey is the tool for you.

When someone walks up to you and starts talking, breaks your concentration with yet another slack message, or diety forbid, actually calls your phone...just type hey <person's name> on the command line.

That's it. Entries will be created in a SQLite database for the event, the person, their association, and when it happened.

Want to start tracking why people are interrupting you? After the interruption you can, optionally, list and tag the events, leave a note, or generate reports graphing all your past interruptions.

Track it for long enough and patterns are sure to emerge. Maybe you'll find that a little documentation could save you hours a week. Maybe you'll find that one person that's devouring more time than anyone else and discuss a better way to handle things.

Instructions

Installation

You'll have to build from source. This requires Chicken Scheme to be installed.

Building from source

1. Run ./install_chicken_eggs.sh to install the libraries it uses.
2. Run ./build.sh to build the hey executable.
3. copy default.db to ~/.local/share/hey/hey.db

You can use a different location by specifying the HEY_DB environment variable, or tweaking the config. See Testing below.

Usage

Record an event

hey <names>

<names> is a space separated list of one or more people's names.

Note: all names are downcased in the database to save worrying about multiple entries when you accidentally type "bob" one time and "Bob" the next.

Record an event and tag it at the same time

Most of the time you create an event as it happens, and you don't know what it's going to be about yet, so you create it, then tag it later. But sometimes you create it just after it happened and you do know what it was about.

hey <names> + <tags>

<names> is a space separated list of one or more people's names.

<tags> is a space separated list of tags to associated with this event.

Viewing recent events

hey hey list or hey list 3

Shows you the most recent interruptions. Defaults to 25.

Last 25 interruptions in chronological order...

 | ID  | When                | Who       | Tags               |
 | 105 | 2017-06-17 08:53:48 | Bob, Mary | meeting, scheduled |
 | 106 | 2017-06-17 08:53:55 | Bob       | question           |
 | 109 | 2017-06-28 11:35:05 | Sam       | task               |

Seeing who's been interrupting you and why

hey who

 | Who        | Interrupts | Tags                                                      |
 | simon      | 3          | manager, question                                         |
 | roman      | 5          | manager, question                                         |
 | andres     | 9          | investigation, question, tl                               |
 | nima       | 10         | merge_request, question, random, request, tl,             |
 | sonal      | 10         | coordination, instructions, planning, question, tl        |
 | greg       | 11         | pairing, question, release_request, tl                    |
 | mike_o     | 13         | beginner, pair_request, question, tl, undocumented        |

Reporting on recent events

hey graph will list all graphing options

hey graph people-by-hour

Collates your data, and loads it in a pretty graph on InterruptTracker.com for you. You can see an example here

NOTE: currently limited to graphing the past 7 days. This will change.

hey graph interrupts-by-day

Same thing, but graphs the number of interrupts by day as a line chart.

hey graph tags-by-hour

Shows you a stacked bar chart of what tags happen during what hours.

NOTE: currently limited to graphing the past 7 days. This will change.

Tag an event

hey tag <event id> <tags>
hey retag <event id> <tags>

<event id> is one of the ids shown by hey list or hey data

<tags> is a space separated list of tags to associated with this event.

If you tag the same event twice then the new tags will be appended to the list.

If you retag an event the new list will replace the old one

Show existing tags

hey tags

Lists all the tags currently in the system.

Comment on an event

hey comment <event id> <my comment string>

<event id> is one of the ids shown by hey list or hey data

<my comment string> is... your comment. Doesn't have to be in quotes. Ends when you hit enter.

Note if you comment on the same event twice it will replace the existing comment with your new one.

Unfortunately none of the current reports expose these comments. There is an open ticket to make these visible. If you want to record them now they will eventually be displayed.

Delete accidental interrupts

hey delete <event id>

<event id> is one of the ids shown by hey list or hey data

Permanently deletes the specified record. There is no undo.

Delete accidental people

hey kill <name>

(Note: No humans will be harmed in the execution of this command.)

Deletes that person from your database, and removes them from any events. If there are events that only involved that person, they will also be deleted.

Exporting Data

NOT IMPLEMENTED

hey data

To be determined. YAML? TOML? JSON?

Whatever format it is should be something that other command line tools can ingest easily. Additionally we may want a simple query language or something similar to allow you to export just the data for a specific person, or date range.

Testing

hey looks for a json file at ~/.config/hey/config.json

To have hey use a different database location set the value of HEY_DB to be the path to your SQLite file.

For example:

{
  "HEY_DB": "~/path/to/my/hey.test.db"
}

When writing new code for hey it's often useful to have it tell you which db its pulling from. Add "show_db_path": true to the config hash and it'll display the db path when you run hey list. This defaults to false if it's not in your config.

If you are building hey from source and not using the shell script created by the installer then you can set the HEY_DB environment variable to a path to your test DB and hey will use that instead. That way you can test / develop on it in a test db but still use it to track real interruptions in the default db.

The environment variable trumps the config file, and the config file trumps the default.