It’s Friday, 5 pm, and you need a simple overview of your project activities for the week — how much time you spent on them, either for invoicing purposes or just for your own personal review of what you’ve accomplished. If you, like me, heavily use Obsidian, there are a few possibilities to do this, but most of them tend to be too complex and don’t really fit my simplified, journal-based workflow in Obsidian. This blog post presents a simple solution.

In my professional work, I juggle many parallel projects with a variety of clients. As you might have read in one of my other blog posts, I heavily rely on daily notes as part of my journaling process in Obsidian. In these daily notes, I not only plan how to structure my day but also add bullet points summarizing my activities and accomplishments. This is where time logging comes into play.

Imagine a Daily Note structure as follows:

As you can see, when I complete an activity during the day, I note it down in my review section. Additionally, I add a tag in the following format: #log/time/<project-id>:<hours-spent>.

This approach has two major advantages over most other plugins or tools you’ll find in the Obsidian ecosystem:

1. It integrates seamlessly into my daily workflow because it’s embedded within daily notes.
2. I stay within standard Markdown notation; I don’t have to store my time logs in JSON or any other external format.

So, what now, how to analyze these daily entries?

So, how do you analyze these daily entries? Although there are a few ways to build simple analyses with Dataview queries, I use the Obsidian Tracker Plugin. While it’s mainly designed for habit tracking, it can also aggregate hours worked into easy-to-read bar charts.

Let me break down the code for you:

searchType: tag
searchTarget: log/time/awesome, log/time/perfect
startDate: <% moment(tp.file.title,'YYYY-[W]ww').startOf('week').add(1,'days').format("YYYY-MM-DD") %>
endDate: <% moment(tp.file.title,'YYYY-[W]ww').startOf('week').add(5,'days').format("YYYY-MM-DD") %>
stack: true
bar:
    title: Time Tracking
    yAxisLabel: Time
    yAxisUnit: H
    yMin: 0
	barColor: yellow, red

As you can see, this code is part of my weekly note in Obsidian. It searches for time-tracking tags in my daily notes and stacks the respective hours into a bar chart visualization within the weekly note. Of course, you can do much more with this data, but for now, this gives you a simple, aggregated view of the time spent on different projects during the current week — making weekly reviews seamless and straightforward.

Links

• Daily Note Rollup
• Obsidian Tracker Plugin