This is very neat. I think this kind of time tracking can be very useful, especially for people in professions that are very self-directing, and provides a mix of short-term and long-term projects. I'm a PhD student and I've been playing around with setting up my own systems (<a href="http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/16/unobtrusive-time-tracker-visualizing-time-spent-with-ruby-and-r/" rel="nofollow">http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/16/unobtrusive-time-tracke...</a> and <a href="http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/29/time-tracker-one-week-on-new-features/" rel="nofollow">http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/29/time-tracker-one-week-o...</a>).<p>A bunch of the things he noted resonate with me, like noting the difference between time spent in the office, and time spent actually working (even when you are not procrastinating, there's all kinds of little things taking your time). I've not been as rigorous about setting goals and then sticking to them, but I did set up a "traffic light" system, aiming to hit 4 hours work on my PhD every day ( a typical "long-term" goal which easily gets buried under short-term commitments and things you can "cross off a list").<p>I also have data that can let me show how long I work on things on average, at what time of the day etc, but I haven't dug into it yet... I see some great posts about quantified self people (like Sacha Chua <a href="http://sachachua.com/blog/2013/07/quantified-awesome-adding-calendar-heatmaps-to-categories/" rel="nofollow">http://sachachua.com/blog/2013/07/quantified-awesome-adding-...</a>), but either they tend to use totally off-the-shelf programs like RescueTime, or they tend to write their own solutions... I'd love for the QS community to come up with some standards, for example a standard way of storing time-use data, and then some common libraries - I'd like to continue logging my time in whatever way works best for me, but if someone makes a really neat way of visualizing time spent vs length of chunks, I'd love to be able to run that analysis on my data too... R would be one nice place to host that.
Stephen Wolfram has been doing this for a while - the data is really interesting over the larger timescale: <a href="http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytic...</a>
"I must admit to feeling some hesitation before writing this post, as I fear it may come across as self-indulgent. My motivation in writing it was to communicate how useful self quantification can be. It is a lifestyle change that I believe some can benefit from, and one that can reduce the chronic stress from which far too many of us suffer."<p>It seems more interesting than useful. Lots of analysis, not much benefit. Maybe<p>"The only hard targets I currently have is to spend >10% of time writing, and >15% of time reading, which I have hit. This was something I struggled with tremendously before, and I only succeeded when I started tracking work type specifically."<p>is a benefit, but it's fairly representative in that it's something of a goal within the system rather than an external benefit.<p>Perhaps there's guilt relieved by realising that a tedious week spent organising a mentoring group increased the amount of interaction as a mentor, but what are the benefits beyond that?
I started doing something similar to help me with my work as a freelancer.<p>My approach involves scheduled popups with questions that are really quick to answer. Right now I'm only asking myself "are you being productive?".<p>I just put it on github an hour ago: <a href="https://github.com/bbonf/productive" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bbonf/productive</a>
It's probably too raw to be helpful to others, but I plan to improve it soon.
As a freelancer I too have found it both helpful and interesting from a data perspective to track my time in a detailed way. I've been using Excel for years, plus an independent (from Excel) calendaring system to block off target periods for specific projects.<p>From the usefulness perspective, tracking my time allows me to a) objectively see where I'm slacking off or rockin' it. Perception can be skewed without the objective tracking; b) view my effectiveness, but only because of how I use my tracking system. If I'm not being effective, I don't enter time for that period. But inspired by OP, I'm going to add an effectiveness metric to my tracking system, and possibly include what my distractors are; c) have a built-in reporting system to my clients, if I need to track hours vs. job for invoicing; d) gain a better sense of how much any given job will take me in advance. This sense has improved dramatically by reviewing my time tracking-data longitudinally.<p>Thanks for sharing, OP. And thanks to the rest of you who posted your own systems and links to other ones.
I'd like to hear more about how he used Mathematica for this.
Especially since he mentions Dynamic, which is more often used for creating interactive content. Maybe he used it as a listener…
At first I was really excited when I saw this post. Then it almost depressed me. To quantify my life based on how "productive" I am at working. I'd prefer to have the reverse, to quantify my leisure at the minute-ly level. Imagine looking at these charts when you're on your death bed. Will you regret that you didn't work as hard as you could have? I don't think I will. Of all the "what I regret most about life" posts I've seen on the internet, I've yet to see someone say "I wish I spent more time working".
I have been using the free version of Manic Time (<a href="http://www.manictime.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.manictime.com/</a>) and it works quite well, as it's quite unobtrusive and doesn't need any input from me.<p>Lifehacker.com has a list of other alternatives too - <a href="http://lifehacker.com/5853163/the-best-time-tracking-app-for-windows" rel="nofollow">http://lifehacker.com/5853163/the-best-time-tracking-app-for...</a>
See Nicholas Felton's work for a more design-oriented approach to personal-statistics. He has an extensive report for most years since 2005.<p><a href="http://feltron.com/ar12_02.html" rel="nofollow">http://feltron.com/ar12_02.html</a>
He seems to put a lot of effort into putting exactly the number of hours into the full job and exactly the number of hours into each project he wants. I don't really consider that valuable, though, and think he is kind of wasting time. At least he made some pretty graphs, though, and got some self gratification for hitting his hourly target exactly. Doesn't really have any meaning re how much actual work he got done, though.