Documentation > Case Studies > Writer

Writer

As a writer you can track time on the different articles and books  you are working on.

In this example we will show you how you can track time on Word but you can track time on any product you use for writing as long as the title of the window changes.

Case study:

Lisa is a writer who works with word and currently writes two books and multiple articles.

As a writer she also use internet for research and inspiration purposes. The book she works on are simply called “book 1″ and “book 2″.

She wants to track time on these items but all she sees now is when he open the “Remind Me” window is just the screenshots :

remind Me Window unconfigured

Not a easy way to track time since you don’t see in a structured way how and when you work on the different items you want to track time.

But this can be changed in the following text it will be explained how to setup Premember so you can easily fill in your tasks.

Overview

The ability to make it easy to look back in time is all based on the window title.

With the window title “screen shot filters” can be set. These make it possible to see at a certain time in a certain color what you did.

So before we start setting this up there is some extra information needed to see if here is a pattern in the window titles that we can use.

Below we will look at the two programs we use to see if there is a pattern in the title of the programs.

Word

The program we use for writing is Word so we will look if there is a pattern in the window title.

When you start “Word” the  the title of the window is always in the format “name” followed by “- Microsoft Word”. When you open a new document the window title look likes this : When you now for example start a new document called “book 1″ the window title will show “book 1 - Microsoft Word”.

The conclusion  is that there is a pattern in the word window title and we will use this to setup the filters.

Internet

The program we use for research is Mozilla Firefox so we will look if there is a pattern in the window title.

When you start “Mozilla Firefox” the title of the window is always in the format “internet page name” followed by “- Mozilla Firefox”.

When you go to to our homepage the title will look likes this :

The conclusion  is that there is a pattern in the window title and we will use this to setup the filters.

Configuration

Now that we have the information needed to setup Premember we will first configure the projects.

After this we will setup the filters with the window title pattern we just found.

Project Setup:

Since Premember works on a project base we have to create projects based on the information lisa gave we create the following 3 Projects :

1. book 1
2. book 2
3. Articles

And under each of these projects we create the following two task categories :

1. Writing
2. Research

Screen shot Filters

With the information lisa gave us and the conclusion we found by looking at the programs lisa uses we setup four filters.

Of this four, three are used for tracking when she writes and one is used for research purposes.

Below is the table of each of the filters we setup, the (*) is a wildcard and is used to mark that the text can be anything at the place of the (*).

Filter name	Filter window title	Color
Writing	* - Microsoft Word	Red
book 1	book 1 - Microsoft Word	blue
book2	book 2 - Microsoft Word	purple
Research	* - Mozilla Firefox	green

End result :

Now that this is all configured you can easily see when and how long you worked on the different books in different colors.

Also you can look back in time and see on what chapter you where working and by zooming in you can actually read the text.

A typical day would now look something like this :

Remind Me window With Remind Me Screenshot Filters Configured

And based on the colors you can easy fill in your tasks, and when you have filled in your tasks it will look something like this :

Remind window with tasks added