Some people use calendars to organize future meetings. I primarily use my calendar to track my past.

When I mention my meticulous time tracking to friends they react in one of two ways:

1. Neat. I do that, too.
2. How do you track the time you spend tracking your time?

If your reaction was the first one, I salute you. Please leave a comment telling me all about it.

For the rest of you…yes, haha…you make a good point. There are significant benefits to tracking one’s time, but it only works if the tracking itself takes hardly any effort or time.

So easy I don’t even notice

Tracking webpages should take no time. I switch tabs every few seconds. I view hundreds of different webpages a day without even realizing. Tracking my web habits with deep granularity is not something I could manually do. That’s part of what makes ProcrasDonate so good.

On the other hand, updating my MacBook Air’s iCal program a few times a day takes hardly any time. I simply bring iCal into focus and drag-n-drop events.

I track my time with minimal granularity:

• 15 minutes is the smallest increment
• Estimation is ok
• I care only about the overall category of my actions
• I write short notes for fun if at all

Whenever I want to get feedback on my activity habits, I run a python script that reads my iCal data and generates weekly statistics and graphs.

Analysis

I began tracking my time because I wanted to see how well I could balance a full time summer job with a demanding startup. It turns out I’m really bad at doing two serious projects at the same time.

I’d like to think I’m not as bad as the time tracking makes out, but the truth is that one serious project, with time for sports and simple building projects to recoup creative energies, is my stable resting state. Since I didn’t collect data early enough, the work that went into ProcrasDonate’s winning entry is the stuff of legend and lore.

My initial interest was simply to track how many hours a week I worked versus wasted time. Culturally, that’s a compelling number. The python script created a webpage with a list of pretty charts, one week after the other, and weekly statistics. The charts were easy to make using google charts, and looking at colorful charts is uplifting. Nonetheless, I primarily look at the weekly totals.

After a handful of weeks it became clear that what I wanted to see was trends. How am I changing each week? As well as averages. What do my cycles or weeks or days tend to look like? The big questions I wanted to answer were:

• Am I improving each week?
• What can I learn about myself in order to get better?

Results

In my first month after the summer I spent most of my time implementing a library to interact with Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS). It was mucky and slow going. I put in 25-35 hours per week on ProcrasDonate. Surfing the web, eating meals, and talking to people are not included.

The next month got better as I saw the big picture for completing our first beta release. My technical skills were also improving, and in general I was ramping up on how to do this work more and more efficiently.

Finally, in November we started using Pivotal Tracker and sending out weekly releases. That brought my weekly totals up to 50-55 hours per week. Looks like my gushing over Pivotal Tracker is justified

Answering the interesting questions

The interesting questions go beyond summing one’s hours per week. They rely on better charts and better analysis. Signal analysis comes to mind.

At first I’d like to focus on better trend charts, perhaps animated to move across weeks. Perhaps stacked lines? Perhaps 24 hr pie charts? Perhaps correlated with Pivotal Tracker or git events?

I’d like to see all my days on top of each other, with the hours of the day and the number of hours spent on the axes. Then I could see when times of the day were prone to time wasting, and how much variance is in my working hou
I’d like to see all my weeks on top of each other, with the days of the week and the hours of the day on each axis. That way I could see when I am most productive, assuming I have a roughly week-long period for my productivity cycles.

Perhaps I can automatically split the trends into cycles and then look for similarities. How much variance is there in cycle length and productivity? Do sports and other projects seem to spur productivity versus take it away? How does sleep fit into all of this?

That this brainstorming heavily ties into ProcrasDonate hasn’t escaped my attention; that working on these charts conflicts with directly working on ProcrasDonate hasn’t escaped, either

Even so, these questions won’t go unanswered for long.

Proudly ProcrasDonating,

Lucy.