I have been using Redmine for tracking some of my work for a number of years. The main drawback for me has been the way you track time on projects. My workflow is largely based around a LaTeX editor, Mendeley/Bibtex and short bursts of various databases trough a browser. Redmine is web-based which in itself is not a problem. However, for a somewhat scatter-brained thesis writer who just needs to casually monitor time, keeping track of yet another tab is not an option.
Since I have been spending some time with Windows 10 recently, I decided to take Microsoft up on their free version of Visual Studio. Using that, I created a small app that allows me to pull up a list of open issues and simply start tracking time on the one I’m working on.
Your installation of Redmine must have the REST API feature enabled and you need a somewhat recent version of Windows for this to work. The application as it is can be found on my Github.