How to create timesheets automatically with TimeSprite

This is a mini-tutorial about creating time sheets from the information automatically recorded by TimeSprite.

Once per minute TimeSprite records the title of the active window on your computer. When you view the reports, it creates groups of similar titles to make the data more manageable.

To create a timesheet, you need to create your own groups and assign the automatic groups or individual window titles to them. This is because the automatic groups are unlikely to correspond with what you actually want in your time sheet. The automatic groups are created from the recorded window titles, so they will be things like “Microsoft Word - Specifications.doc”. To create a timesheet, you need to assign these to timesheet entries.

Until you assign these entries to your own groups, all time in the timesheet will be listed as “Unclassified”. This line is shown in the timesheet reports so you know how much time has not been assigned to an entry. If the amount of time in the Unclassified line is significant, you should go to the Time or Journal pages and classify the unclassified time.

Assigning recorded time to timesheet entries

To assign the entries to a group, right click on them in the Time screen and click “Group”. If you enter a new group name it will be created automatically. You can assign the automatically created groups or the individual window titles.

This is all that is required for entries that are consistently applied to the same time sheet item. The grouping is remembered for future entries. You should only need to repeat this step when you get new entries that haven’t been classified before.

Assigning by time

You can also assign blocks of time to timesheet entries. If you want to assign all off Tuesday morning to an entry, simply select the time in the Journal, right click and and assign it as above. You can do this for blocks of time as small or large as required.

Assigning blocks of time overrides the grouping performed in the previous step, because it is more specific. This is useful for making adjustments to time sheets.

Entries that vary

Sometimes the same item might be assigned to different timesheet entries. For example, email and other administrative time might be assigned to the “project du jour.”

To make processing these entries easier, assign them to a single group from the Time page. You can then assign this group to the correct entry from the Journal.

You can change the settings for this group from the Edit->Groups menu to exclude it from the timesheet. It will then be counted in the “Unclassified” time until you assign it. Or, you might choose to leave it in the timesheet to remind you to assign the time to the correct group.

Exporting time sheets to Excel and other programs

Once you have created the timesheet, you can use copy and paste to get the data into Excel or other programs. You can also save the timesheet as a CSV file which can be read by Excel and many other applications. Simply choose File->Export to CSV from the menu when viewing the timesheet.