Introduction

One of the most common question in the daily (especially business) life is the question of time: “How long will you need for this?” or “How long did you work on the job?”. The answer is mostly based on approximations. To guess the time for an action somehow accurately he/she needs to have experience in what he/she has to do. Quite a lot of projects fail or users get unsatisfied due to wrong approximations. Frederick Brooks wrote in his popular book ‘The Mythical Man-Month’: “More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined. Why is this cause of disaster so common? First, our techniques of estimating are poorly developed. More seriously, they reflect an unvoiced assumption which is quite untrue, i.e., that all will go well.[…]”(Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional; 1st edition, 1995) Human beings are way too optimistic when it comes to guessing time and this does not only affect software development it is also true for all other creative work.
Todays home computers have the power to composite and cut movies, create music albums with complete virtual orchestration but these computers can not help the user in telling him/her how long he/she worked on a single file? This information could greatly enhance communicating the approximate timing for a specific task and besides that, help the user in getting an overview on his daily productivity.
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Mechanism

But how to count the time the user have been working on a document? If a document window becomes the front most window, a timer starts in the background. If the window is not active anymore or the computer has been idle for a specified time the timer stops and this new duration will be added to the existing one. That’s all. The ‘Duration’ information plays from a data structure point of view in the same league as the ‘Created’ or ‘Modified’ information. It could be stored as an extended attribute to the file which is associated with the document from the current active window.
“Extended attributes extend the basic attributes associated with files and directories in the file system. They are stored as name:data pairs associated with file system objects (files, directories, symlinks, etc).”(developer.apple.com)
Now that each file has an information on how long the user have been working on that document there is also the topic on how he/she retrieves that information. Logically this information gets displayed when the user look at the file info for a specific file or a selection of files (directory or additive selection). But besides that the duration of files could also be incorporated into different applications i.e. calendar or project management apps. There could also be an interface for retrieving the duration of files for online applications like basecamp which could result in a complete new set of features.
Besides the single display of a duration in the file info properties there should also be the option of resetting the duration of a single or a selection of files. In a template-based working scenario the need for resetting the templates duration emerges sooner or later.
Adding a duration property to a file is a small adjustment to the current man-machine interface but it is one which takes advantage of working digitally(there is no background timer while cutting wood or painting a wall).
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Private vs Public

But the topic of a files duration is putting up another question on the board: private and public meta data. Right now the operating system does not differ between private and public meta data. With the introduction of duration it could be necessary to create an interface for the user to declare what kind of information he/she would like to share and what kind of information he/she would like to keep in a more or less private frame. Apples iTunes for example counts the amount of time someone listened to a track or when he/she listened to it lately. These informations are stored inside a local iTunes Database and are not saved inside the music file. This solution is not very scalable or flexible but it addresses the just mentioned problem.
Developing a more solid and flexible system/structure on how people classify private and public meta data is going to become a necessity in the near future. The introduction of meta data search engines like spotlight or google desktop puts some pressure on that topic as well.
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