Workspace Timer

Small Vite + React timer app with local persistence and optional Supabase sync.

App setup

Install dependencies and start the app:

npm install
npm run dev

Build for production:

npm run build

Supabase setup

1. Create a Supabase project.
2. Run the SQL in supabase/schema.sql in the Supabase SQL editor.
3. Copy .env.example to .env.local.
4. Fill in VITE_SUPABASE_URL, VITE_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY, and VITE_ALLOWED_EMAIL.
5. Enable Supabase Auth for email/password sign-in.
6. In Supabase Auth, create that exact email address as the only allowed user and set its password.
7. Restart npm run dev.

If you intentionally want to wipe and rebuild the sync tables during development, use supabase/reset.sql instead. It is destructive.

If those env vars are missing, the app stays on local-only persistence.

Persistence

Projects, workspaces, outcomes, session history, and timer progress are always saved in browser localStorage on the current device.

When Supabase is configured and you sign in, the app syncs the normalized state model to:

• app_preferences
• workspaces
• projects
• outcomes
• bursts

The current sync model is user-scoped with Supabase Auth and RLS. The app also enforces a single allowed email address from VITE_ALLOWED_EMAIL.

Reasons for Tracking and Analyzing Time

Straight out from https://github.com/DataResearchLabs/my_time_tabulator

1. Measure to Improve: Age old quote..."What gets measured gets improved".
2. Monitoring Value: If time is more valuable than money, why do so few track it relative to tracking money?
3. Your Story: "It is performance review time...what did you accomplish last quarter or last year?"
   • Managers are too busy to notice all the great work you do...so package it up into easily digestible projects, tasks, times, and dates.
   • Sell your work story...because nobody else is going to do it for you.
4. Red Light - Green Light: Wouldn't it be nice to tag and rollup all your tasks to identify activities like meetings that are potentially misusing or even wasting time:
   • Green Light: What you were hired to do
   • Yellow Light: What can be delegated or packaged for a peer
   • Orange Light: What may be important, but not what you were hired to do
   • Red Light: What wastes time, not what you were hired to do
5. Self-Improvement: by comparing efficiency of similar tasks and projects over time against yourself (bad idea to compare to others, stick to improving yourself).
6. Scope Creep: When you monitor where your time is going, you can quickly show the impact of scope creep and course correct earlier
7. Happiness: If you are grinding away focusing 100% of your time on critical tasks with no 5% or 10% creative slow-down time, then you are likely on a path to burn-out. Use these metrics to make the case for saying "No" more frequently, or to ask for a little bit of R&D time.
8. Tee-Shirt Baselines: Rollup project times to establish historical baselines used for preliminary estimates or to counter unrealistic project timelines.
9. Just Billable Hours? If you are a consultant, you already track your time for billing hours, 'nuff said, right?
   • Not quite, because there is value beyond billing hours...
   • You can slice and dice the hours, to see how they rollup to projects, to categories, and how the time flows
     (a 40 hour task does not take 1 week, the hours ebb and flow at different rates, mingling with other tasks and priorities)
10. Time Boxing: If you work on agile projects and need to time box certain activities, how do you know when you've hit the limit?
11. Dial in Your Estimates: to improve your pipeline...
    • The construction industry has this down in spades
      • How much does it cost per square foot of building footprint to build a 3-story building with wood beam construction, etc., etc.
      • Check out RS Means and their thousands of ways to estimate anything construction related.
      • This accuracy in construction estimates exists only because they track costs AND TIME.
    • Now compare that against the laughable lack of estimating accuracy and depth in the software industry.
      • In construction, labor is ~50% of the cost.
      • In software, labor is like 90%+ of the cost; therefore, tracking time is even more important...yet it is rarely done.