I recently moved to Grindstone 4 from 3, which I started using a few months ago when I started a new position at work. My supervisor used 3 so I did too. But then another guy in the group mentioned that he uses 4 so I decided to try it out.
One difference in behavior that I am not a fan of is how time is how a new time slice is created every time I select “Allocate the time to what I was timing when I left”. Most of the times I’m ‘away’ it is just because I was setting up some equipment or writing in a notebook or something like that, at my desk, on the same task, so it shouldn’t be a new time slice at all.
Yes, the option to automatically merge time slices means I don’t actually see all those time slices (a great addition to Grindstone 4), but I do like to have Grindstone prompt for notes when I start and stop time slices. Together that means I get prompted for quotes every single time I come back to my computer after just a few minutes of being away. It is so annoying I turned off the notes prompt, which means I now have to go in and manually add notes to each of my time slices after I start or stop them.
Is that the end of the world? No, but it is more effort, and that makes it that much easier to forget to do or to put off, and then I’ll forget what I wanted to put in the notes.
(As I side note, it is also annoying that a window pops up asking for my notes, and a notification comes up in the bottom right corner and the notification doesn’t go away even though I’ve dealt with the notes window. The notification is fine on its own, but not if the window already pops up anyway. Give me one or the other, but not both please, I don’t want to have to clear away two windows for the same thing.)
And it just feels wrong that a new time slice is created needlessly every time just to be merged with the previous time slice right away. CPU time isn’t free. 