Your time tracking habits will be dictated by your reason for collecting the data. What is that you want to do with the data? Is it plain curiosity, or a work requirement? And at what level of detail are you interested in the results?
A suggested pace is to have 5 to 30 activities per day.
The intention of Time Tracker is to avoid micro-tracking so that one does not turn out spending more time on tracking than doing the activities! However, tracking in insufficient detail could result in there being no data which is useful to you a month later.
For simple activities that don’t have a project, use the action as the activity name and the category for the wider context. For example: lunch@work.
For more sophisticated tracking try to caption your activity in one or two words (“tree house”, “project x”, or similar) and use that caption in the activity field. Use the category to describe the activity in it’s wider context - is it private or work, or something else? Finally, use tags to describe your actual action - is it reading or constructing, writing or painting.
This approach will alow you to see how much reading you have done through all your projects (by tag), how much time you have spent in your hobbies (by category), and how much time of all your work in project x you have spent analysing (by activity and tag)
Name activities so that they can be easily distinguished from each other. Activity name is also the only information that appears in the panel. Will you be able to determine what you are working on just by looking at the activity name?
Keep your list of categories small (say, 3 to 7) and pick ones that are unlikely to change over time. Also, keep them generic. For example: “work”, “private”, “misc”.
Use the description field for short-term information like reference numbers. The search in the Overview window also looks in the description field, so finding activities where you mention the specific reference number will be as simple as typing it in the search box and pressing Enter.
Activities and tags can come and go as necessary. Once you think that you are done with an activity for good, remove it so that it doesn’t pop up in the auto-complete any more. Don’t worry: the facts (activities in the log) will not be deleted. This is just the “operational list”.