Overall time spent on a project - timestamps?

Hello everyone. i was thinking that it would be helpful and perhaps useful if there was a way to show how much time an overall project has taken from the moment of opening/creating a new project to its final end.

For instance, I wrote a novel say 90,000 words, and started April 4, 2009 and completed it December 2014. That is somewhat interesting i suppose but i think it would be very helpful if each time a project was opened a timestamp was running and every time you did something it was marked. (much like a customer service rep updating your account. When you call they note why you called and a timestamp dates when)

For example, in my 90,000 word novel chapter 1 took 18 weeks to complete for example and it was “touched”/edited 75 times and here are the dates and times (you could incorporate words typed each time in here if you wanted)

From my view it would be useful to know exactly how much time one actually spent on a project, so even though the novel took 5 years to complete i really only spent 200 hours in actual time doing something in it as an example. This obviously shows that an intimate relationship with my dog was paramount in my mind instead of finishing the novel, but it is also serves as a personal historical perspective on your writing.

The concept of closing a project would have to be incorporated that would cause the project to no longer be eligible to editing (the final project preserved) but could easily be opened again if so required, and yes the timestamp would be updated.

Thanks

Some of what you are asking for already exists, but in slightly different forms or via different apps. For example, you could create snapshots at the end of every editing session - their timestamps would give an idea of what was changed and when.

If you wanted a more precise record of actual time working on a specific Scrivener project, then you are probably better served by an activity recording app such as Timing. This app could tell you, to the second, how much time you spent on a given Scrivener project over any time span you choose (provided, of course, that it was running at the time).

Finally, if you want to prevent edits to a completed project, right click on it in Finder and simply select the checkbox titled “Locked”. I did this with my doctoral thesis (I also created a duplicate for viewing so that the original is untouched).

+1 for Timing. It is one of my favorite apps on the planet.