Automatic Time Tracking 24 hrs/day with Timing

Journaler
Journaler
Nov 7 · 5 min read

Tuesday, 5 Nov 2019 — Karl Apartment — 9P 9F

Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash

For quite some time now I’ve been wanting to track what I spend my time on. Last week I got renewed interest mainly since I wanted to know where all my time went spent at the office which magically seemed to disappear. This lead me down a quest to find the best time tracker. I had three major requirements.

  1. Little effort for a lot of details
  2. Be able to log every minute of my days (including sleep, private life and company)
  3. Divide private time and company time into a few major categories

I tried a bunch of manual time trackers before such as Toggl and a few iPhone apps. They all worked for a few days, but was too much effort for me in the long run. I even used google calendar for tracking all my time for a while. I also ended up building a small app that fetched this calendar, and visualized the events in more compact form.

A random week a few months back when I tried entering every minute of the day in Google Calendar

I have not been able to draw many conclusions from these manual time trackers before so this time I focused all my attention on automatic ones. I found a bunch, but ended up choosing between Rescue Time, Timing and Timely. I used them all for a while and Timing ended up fitting my requirements the best.

It’s a little bit cumbersome to log 24 hours a day. It is meant to be used mainly for logging time spent with computer. This is true for all time trackers I found. Especially the automatic ones.

That said, here is everything great I found about it:

  • An AMAZING 7 day overview (seen below) which really shows where my time was spent the last 7 days. I can also dive in and see exactly how many hours I’ve spent on different tasks.
  • The automatic detection of applications used and even which workspace or url in chrome that I’ve been to is easy to find.
  • Better pricing model than Timely. And is available through setapp.
  • Calendar integration so I can sometime see what I did when I was offline. I also use the calendar integration to add additional help in classifying offline time. One such example is a ifttt rule that adds an event to my calendar whenever I leave or arrive home.
  • Since I use my computer as much as I do it was a bonus getting the application break down
My last 7 days

I learnt a few things.

  • I spend less time with company related things than I thought (less than 40 h/week)
  • I slept way to little this week (~5 hours average)
  • Social events took up a lot more of my total time than I thought. It felt like I was pretty much spending all my time with self projects and relaxing, but I spent almost as much time on social events
  • I thought I would have to really turn around and make an effort spending a lot less time on relaxing related things. But seems it was not as bad as I thought. The time I spend on projects seems I easily forget.

Since a girl I dated influenced me to think about equality, specifically between genders, I’ve been thinking recently how to visualize this. Today I had an idea that I spent some time on.

The main idea is to first show the entire pay gap between two groups for example women and men. Then let the user choose different filters and factors so they can make an informed decision on what actions would generate the most results to reduce the pay gap.

If for example the biggest change between two groups are that one group works in a higher paid industry. Then the highest impact action would be to either make every industry more diverse or have equal pay between industries.

Very much a work in progress design of a potential inequality concept

During lunch I had a meeting with mostly leading tech recruiters for different companies. Mainly tech consultant companies. I was the only one from a product company so our challenges were pretty different from the others. The main takeaway from the meeting was that

  1. Even a tech consultant company can have a beautiful mission (help distribute resources in a more and more digitized world)
  2. I need to practice introduction of both myself and of our company
  3. The calmness I’m trying to portray works in many cases
  4. I need to practice shot downs i.e. how to reply to someone that is making your sound stupid with or without reason. Here calmness does not work.
  5. Honest compliments works even for high profile people
  6. Potential contact with an interesting partner for our company

Implemented code review process at work. What triggered it was AW yesterday where everyone else is praising it over all others. Strategy is pretty much to jump right in with the most basic of workflow. Lock down master branches and use Gitlab merge request. Pretty much require one other person to look at every code merged into master.


Focus on time tracking, code review strategy, equality tool design concept and lunch meeting with various tech leaders. Ran 1km in the morning, did not finish the tasks for the day at all since I focused time tracking and code review process. Vaccination.

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Journaler

Overly serious about achievements, self-improvement and product design

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