Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: mobile and web
URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: NA
Description of need:
I spent hundreds of hours doing identifications on iNaturalist every year. As I’m sitting here doing my taxes, it occurred to me that it would be awesome if iNat had a feature that tracked how much time you spend on the platform, even better if it can tell what you were doing during that time (identifying, uploading observations, etc.) This would also be really interesting to see in the yearly reviews that each iNat member gets.
Feature request details:
I would like to be able to run a report that documents how much time I spend on iNaturalist in total and if it could be broken down by what I was doing (uploading observations, identifying, etc.) that would be even better. Include time spent on iNat in the yearly individual stats (year in review).
there are existing browser extensions and apps that can help you track how much time you spend on particular websites. that said, i’m not sure that active time on particular sites, pages, or apps necessarily translates to time spent on particular tasks. for example, just because i’m looking at an observation doesn’t mean i’m trying to identify it. or on the other hand, just because i’m looking at YouTube videos doesn’t mean i’m not using that as part of my research for identifying something.
in the days when i used to bill by the hour, one quick way to keep track of what i was doing on a Windows computer was to start a document in Notepad. every time i wanted to track a change in state (ex. starting a task, stopping a task, etc.), i would go to the Notepad document, press F5, which would record a timestamp, and then add a note about what the timestamp represented. then at the end of the day, i would use that log to summarize my time spent on different things. the nice thing about using a document like that is that i could edit it easily in case i forgot something. once you get used to keeping a log like that, it becomes second nature.
I use a spreadsheet as my time log. I record start and end times and it does all the calculations for me! Also makes reporting easier across multiple projects and reportees.
yes, a spreadsheet is a nice way to capture the final numbers in a structured way, although i still like the flexibility of a simple document to track things initially. that said, the natural language AIs nowadays do a good job at parsing and summarizing even text logs.