til/workflow/do-project-time-tracking-from-the-cli.md

Do Project Time Tracking From The CLI

The watson CLI utility is built to help track time across projects right from the terminal. It is written in Python and can be installed via brew or pip3.

To start tracking a new or existing project, I can specify it by name like so:

$ watson start my-project +reporting
Starting project my-project [reporting] at 00:28

This starts a timer for the my-project project and includes the tag reporting. Tags are optional but can give some context to what part of a given project this time session is for.

At any point during a session, we can check the status.

$ watson status
Project my-project [reporting] started 14 seconds ago (2025.11.14 00:28:31-0600)

And when we are done working on that project for the time being, we can stop it.

$ watson stop
Stopping project my-project [reporting], started a minute ago and stopped just now. (id: e8e8ed5)

Once we're ready to start another session (timeframe), we just need to run watson start ... again.

See watson --help for other subcommands provided by the utility.