At Automattic, many teams have a process where they post weekly, or biweekly, updates. One of the things that I’ve often found difficult, as I write my personal update, is remembering all of the little things that I did for the past week.

Sure, since I work on the computer, there’s usually some paper trail for what I did. But, getting that paper trail meant that I needed to comb through various sources and then also try to remember the things that didn’t have a paper trail.

One of my favorite tools for getting all of the tasks that I completed in one place, and minimizing the number of things that weren’t tracked, was iDoneThis. But, it’s got a lot more functionality than I need. So, I set out to implement something to track completed tasks locally.

A simple Alfred workflow

Introducing the Dones workflow for Alfred! ?

This very simple workflow works by querying done {query}. The workflow will then take over and do the following:

• Create a new file with a name like 2020-03-31.txt, where 2020-03-31 is the current date
• Add the done as a new line in that file, prepended with a timestamp. Ex. 4:19:32 PM: hello world

With this setup, you’ll get a single file for each day that you record dones. You can then browse through those in the standard Mac file browser.

Installation

To install the Dones workflow, simply download the workflow from Github and then double click to import it in Alfred.

Future work

At the moment, there is no definite future work planned. That being said, one nice-to-have that is on my mind is adding a command to sum up a period’s dones. For example, maybe something like dones_sum 7 that gets the past 7 day’s worth of dones.