Attn!

Why?

Knowing what you do is important. It is easy to say what you are doing minute to minute, but over long periods we tend to forget. Attn! is designed to give you access to what you are doing with your attention, to give you control over your future.

"Yet another time tracking app..." No! Time is inevitable - there are 24 hours in a day whatever you do. Your attention is yours to control and you move it around like a spotlight. Focus is important for productivity - you can take 20 minutes to get back up to speed after a distraction. By exposing how you are using your attention, Attn! helps you habituate focus.

What?

Attn! is a tool which we use every day to track which projects we are working on, a basis for billing and to improve our estimation.

How?

Use Attn! when you change what you are giving your attention to.

1. Type a project name, add a time modifier if you need to. For example, to say that you changed to the "beef" project 30 minutes ago, you type "beef -30".
2. If you're finished and you're letting your attention wander to things you're not tracking, type "off", or if your attention goes on to another thing you are tracking, just skip back to step 1.
3. When you want to review how you've been using your attention, go to the analysis screen by clicking the arrow on the right of the page.

Next up...

We'll be adding the facility to add notes and tags to an attn! event, so you'll have more useful contextual data. On the analysis side, we'll be adding a running total that shows how much time you've spent on what you can see, along with the ability to filter the periods by project and date ranges.

All the events you put into Attn! have a URL and are accessible through an HTTP API, so anyone can create visualisations of Attn! events. This also means that you can take your information with you or put it into another system.