I’ve spent as much time as I can organising my own personal use of the 2-Hour Rule. It started in a paper notepad, as a manual tracking of time spent. As you could have guessed, it became boring to use pen and paper for my own tracking, I even forgot on several days to track the time I spent. I added no time for the days I forgot, as it gave me an excuse to add in a little extra time. It gave me the idea; I should just make a small app for myself to add automation to the time tracking, and it helps it seem more impressive already!

The aim is simple; have a guided time tracker on the main habits I’d like to focus on, regularly in a day.

• Activity: The actual activity done to help with the habit; for instance, Exercise, or Game Development.
• Session: The time you spent doing said Activity; for instance, I start writing a post here, I select Blog and press Start, then when I stop and move to doing something else, I press Stop.

The goal is to leave it to the end user to manage their own time tracking for the 2-Hour Rule.

There were simple goals for this app.

• Total time spent this year so far on all Activities you want to track
• The goal to aim for to fulfil the 2-Hour Rule for this year (over 30 days)
• The list of Activities has High, Medium, and Low, priority so you can try focus on the more important activities, or when you want to take a break can use more chilled ones
• An option to add a new activity, +New, select an activity and Start it, or Stop current activity session that’s running
• A live timer for the current session
• A way to stop the current session if you forgot to stop it earlier, for 1, or 2, hours, or only 30 minutes; this is to ensure if for instance I forget to stop the session after 1 hour lunch break, I can just use Oops 1h to not have that session Stop at the end of the day at 4 or 5 hours.
• Lastly, if you did not end a session the day before; it won’t count. It becomes only 1 minute and ends

This may seem harsh, the idea I had is simple. Have an easy-to-use method to track time spent on the actions I find can fit into my 2-Hour Rule self-improvement for this year as a whole. The added bonus, I spent around 2 hours when I had the idea yesterday, and around 1 hour 30 minutes this morning, and the app has started in personal Beta testing.

Yes, on the day’s I’ve missed out on using pen and paper, I’ve lost a day and a half, so far. I did even more than the 2 hours needed in each day but chose to catch up afterwards as if I did nothing, and tracked it, as you can see, I needed a legitimate goal amount of time to catch up to. Now I can easily track the time, no matter where I am, for the rule. It feels easier already.

For anyone that would like to try it for themselves, nothing is ever shared anywhere; it has simple usability, there might be a bug or two I missed.

• za.co.edg3.timespent APK (38mb)