Time tracking — Wakatime ONLY (Toggl walked back)

decision Sat Jun 20 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) decisionsarchitectureproductivitytime-trackingwakatimetoggl-rejectedwalk-back

Time tracking — Wakatime ONLY (Toggl walked back)

Decision

Time tracking across the family is Wakatime, automatic, only.

• Wakatime — automatic coding-time tracking via IDE plugin (VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains family). Free auto-tracking with daily / weekly / monthly charts. Recruiter-facing public dashboard at wakatime.com/@chirag127. Sole pick.
• Toggl Track — REJECTED. Originally adopted earlier on 2026-06-20 (Batch 19) as the manual half of a two-tool split; walked back the same day under the new family-wide auto-only-tracking rule.
• Non-coding time is intentionally NOT tracked. Meetings, planning, calls, learning sessions — untracked. The honest read of "what was the user doing during a 2-hour Wakatime gap?" is "away from the keyboard", not "they should manually fill it in later".

This file was renamed via git mv from time-tracking-toggl-plus-wakatime.md to reflect the new content. History is preserved.

User direction (chronological, same day 2026-06-20):

1. Earlier: "Toggl + Wakatime both."
2. Later: "I want everything to be automatically tracked no manual tracking."

The later direction wins per rules/interaction/future-overrides-past.md.

Why

• Manual tracking decays. Humans forget to start timers, fudge stops, skip days, retro-fill incorrectly. The resulting data is dishonest, which makes it worse than no data.
• Auto-tracking is honest. Wakatime's IDE-plugin heartbeat records what actually happened — no human in the loop, no "I'll write it down later" failure mode.
• Untracked time is a feature, not a bug. A 2-hour gap in Wakatime data is information: the user was away from the keyboard. That's a fact worth capturing as untracked, not a hole to paper over with a fabricated manual entry.
• Family-wide consistency. Every other tracked metric in the family is already auto (errors ? Sentry, page views ? CF Web Analytics + GA4 + Clarity, logs ? CF Workers Tail + Better Stack, uptime ? Better Stack pings). Time tracking was the only manual outlier; the auto-only rule normalises it. See auto-tracking-everywhere for the family-wide pattern.
• Wakatime stays free + no-card. The 2-week-history limitation is mitigated by daily lifestream JSONL export (the API is the funnel, JSONL is the durable archive). Fits rules/no-card-on-file + rules/no-subscriptions.
• Wakatime's recruiter-facing dashboard is a public artifact that surfaces "what tech stack the user actually uses" — pairs with the everything-is-public-OSS posture per repos-work-independently and the donation rails per max-payment-methods.

Why not the rejected options

Implications

Surface coverage

If a non-coding-time signal is ever needed in the future, the answer is make it auto (e.g. ingest from Google Calendar API, not "ask the user to start a timer"). That call lands as a new decision, not a re-adoption of Toggl.

Setup (one-time)

# Wakatime — install per IDE
code --install-extension WakaTime.vscode-wakatime
# JetBrains: Settings ? Plugins ? Marketplace ? "WakaTime"
# API key from wakatime.com/settings/account ? ~/.wakatime.cfg

API key originates at Doppler per secrets-management-doppler; not committed anywhere.

Toggl walk-back — concrete steps

• No Toggl Track account is created. If one was created during the brief Batch 19 adoption window earlier today, it stays unused and will be deleted at next account-cleanup pass.
• No TOGGL_API_TOKEN in Doppler or any runtime secret store.
• No lifestream ingest of Toggl data — the future lifestream pulls from auto sources only (Wakatime API, GitHub commits, npm publishes, CI events, CF Web Analytics — see auto-tracking-everywhere).
• The services/business/productivity/toggl-track.md file stays with status: rejected for audit trail per the family pattern of "flip status, never delete".

Tag / project conventions

• Wakatime auto-classifies by git repo + language, so no manual setup beyond installing the plugin. Tags / projects line up automatically with chirag127/oriz* repo names on disk.

Lifestream integration (future)

When oriz-me ingest pipelines land per lifestream-jsonl-canonical:

• Wakatime ingest — daily cron pulls /users/current/summaries from Wakatime API (wakatime.com/api/v1), maps to JSONL events of shape { "type": "code-summary-wakatime", "ts": ..., "duration_s": N, "language": "...", "project": "..." }.
• This feed powers the "where did the time go?" panel on me.oriz.in (auth-gated per journal-stays-auth-gated if the user keeps the panel private; or public-aggregate per wakatime.com/@chirag127's existing public surface).
• No Toggl ingest line.

What we don't do

• No paid tier on Wakatime. Free covers rolling-2-week history; long-term history is handled by the lifestream daily-export pattern (JSONL is durable; the API is just the funnel).
• No Toggl Track. Or any other manual tracker. Or a spreadsheet. Or a Discord-bot /track command. Or anything that requires the user to push a button to record time.
• No team-shared workspaces. Wakatime is single-user; no team.
• No automated context-switching detection. If the user is on a meeting and Wakatime sees no coding, that's correctly recorded as no coding — the meeting itself is intentionally untracked.

Cross-refs

• Wakatime service entry — sole time-tracking pick
• Toggl Track service entry — REJECTED — audit trail
• Productivity services index
• Auto-only-tracking rule — the rule that rejected Toggl
• Auto-tracking-everywhere decision — family-wide auto-only principle
• Future overrides past rule — why the later "auto only" direction wins over the earlier "Toggl + Wakatime both"
• oriz-me added to family — lifestream consumes Wakatime data
• Lifestream JSONL canonical — JSONL shape for ingested time entries
• Secrets management — Doppler — API key
• Project mgmt — GitHub Projects only — separate concern (plan vs. effort actuals)
• No card-on-file rule
• No subscriptions rule