I’ve had something like this for about three years now, except it doesn’t open vim, I just use a single read command and it appends whatever I type with a time stamp. One file per quarter. And there’s a cron job to pop up a window each hour to remind me to type what I’m working on.

I’ve used this to figure out how much time I spent on certain tasks by sampling it Monte Carlo style. And sometimes when I run into some weird non-googleable problem, it happens again a few months later and the solution is in those files.

It’s like my own real-life syslog. Or like a scientist’s lab notebook.