Dunnit is a KISS process for recording your daily goals and activity and making that easy to find and use for weekly, monthly, and any sort of reporting — think resumes, daily standups, quarterly reports, annual reviews, etc. It’s dumbly simple: you just answer the popup every hour with a short one-line response. It is not a TODO app, because TODOs are aspirational; Dunnits are factual and enable you to capture impact.

Dunnit is set to pop up a notification prompt every hour to ask you what you worked on. The update you record in the popup is saved to a daily log (the ledger). At the end of the day, you’ll end up with a timestamped list of things you worked on. At that point, Dunnit helps you convert your day into an “impact report”.

Analysis is CLI-driven for now. You can roll up your Dunnits at the end of a week or a month. Generate status reports and aggregate by tag categories.

Dunnit is a proof of concept, not quite a real app (yet!). The UI is just a handful of scripts cobbled together into something that kinda works. The real version is getting started, and will run on at least Linux and Windows desktops, but the minimal functionality you’re seeing here is enough for you to get comfortable with the Dunnit workflow (on Mac only). Please try it out for a couple weeks, collect your thoughts, and send me anything (good, bad, ideas, whatever) you’re willing to share about your experience with it. Any feedback is so valuable to me, and I will buy or make you a very fancy drink of your choosing next time we meet.

Do most of these steps from a terminal. I would like to see you succeed with Dunnit, so please reach out to me for help with any of this.

1. Open a terminal: Open up spotlight (Cmd-Space) and type terminal

2. Type git and you will be prompted to install “developer tools” (Xcode). Proceed with that. This will take a couple minutes.

3. Install Homebrew. This will take several ~4 minutes.

   /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

4. Clone this Dunnit repo to ~/dunnit (this step is not flexible!)

   # go to your $HOME
   cd
   git clone https://github.com/MicahElliott/dunnit.git
   cd dunnit

5. Sign in/up for a Github (or Gitlab) account.

6. Set up a remote git repo to track your Dunnits: One common approach to this is creating a private Github repo. Follow those instructions, and:

   • name your new repo “mydunnits”
   • select the radio button “Private”
   • check the box “Add a README file”

7. Set up an ssh key. The following will create a pair of “key files”.

   ssh-keygen
   cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

   The public key is now at ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub its contents were just printed to your terminal. You should now paste those contents into your github settings. Click the green “New SSH key” button, and paste it into the “Key” box.

8. Clone your Dunnit daily activity repo for local tracking. Replace YOURUSERNAME with your github user name.

   cd ~/dunnit
   git clone [email protected]:YOURUSERNAME/mydunnits.git log

9. Finish the Dunnit setup by installing the remaining dependencies. Be sure to accept all the notifications.

   cd ~/dunnit
   ./install.zsh

See help.txt for usage (this help is also built into Dunnit).

• til
• win
• career
• mtg
• idea

You can stop the service (if you ever feel the need) with: launchctl unload dunnit.plist.

It’s a good idea to adopt some tagging conventions for categorizing your Dunnits. Suggestions: ticket numbers, #star, #rollup

Search for hashtags across all log files:

% g '#mywork'
log/2020/w22-May/20200529-Thu.log
[1518] Added snooze feature to #mywork

log/2020/w22-May/20200528-Wed.log
[1739] Added proper LAST message to #mywork

log/2020/w23-Jun/20200601-Mon.log
[1605] Refactored and added some separated commands to #mywork

The following config reflects the defaults. It will leave you with a local directory and sequence of files (with timestamped lines) like: ~/dunnit/log/2020/w23-Jun/20200530-Mon.log

# The location of all the daily dunnit log files
export DUNNIT_DIR=~/doc/dunnit

# THESE ARE NOT YET IMPLEMENTED…
# The timestamp format for each entry
export DUNNIT_TIME_FMT='%…'
# The directory format
export DUNNIT_DATE_FMT='%…'
# Use org-mode date-stamp formatting and file extensions
export DUNNIT_USE_ORG=false

[0800] Walked the dog, listened to a podcast; not feeling very productive
[0900] Started the work day with a boring meeting
[1000] Refactored the time traveller #DUMB-42
[1100] Addressed a few linter errors #DUMB-42
[1400] Drew the diagram
[1500] Reviewed John’s PR; tried to make my Emacs windowing faster
[1700] Figured out why the data isn’t showing up in the bucket #DUMB-97

• add a couple utils to analyze/summarize the day, week, etc
• throw away launchd and just go with daemonize
• flexible scheduler to run on the hour instead of when started
• generate a weekly or monthly status report with the key tagged
• histogram/word cloud of used hashtags
• ditto“ button to indicate working on same thing as last time
• more tagging conventions?
• clickable menubar icon for recording a dunnit at any time
• configurable/invocable day start and end prompts
• better menuing with checkboxes for planned/completed items
• org-todo as basis for structure
• store all todos (not dunnits) in a single file
• support archive feature