JulianSchrader.de

Keep Track Of What You’re Doing — 3 Applications To Further Efficient Working

The timer in my menubar says 0:01 — let’s begin. I’m trying to track every minute I spend working on a project — and everything’s a project, whether it’s homework or preparation for school, writing for this blog or doing work for a client. Except hanging around on YouTube or Facebook — as long as it is not for the purpose of research for a project.

So why do I treat nearly everything I do as a project and log the minutes and hours I spent on it? Because I hate to have no answer when I ask myself in the evening: “Hey Julian, what exactly did you do with your time today?”. What about you?

Keep on doing what you want to check off

The timer in my menubar is what keeps me focused on what I’m doing. It remembers me to ignore any distractions and therefore keeps productivity on a high level.

When I’m distracted — e.g. when a call comes in and I can’t ignore it — I stop or pause the timer. Don’t lie to yourself by counting minutes during which you didn’t do what you should do. It’s far more satisfactory to know that you really advantaged your project for 75 minutes and didn’t spend time on silly things while the timer ran.

When I take a look at my calendar in the evening, I can clearly see the blocks of time I spent on the variuos projects and it’s easy to analyse whether the day was spent reasonably or not — and which parts of your way of working should receive an enhancement.

Additionally, tracking the time you spend on tasks will help you estimating the time it’ll take you in the future.

TimeLog. Does what the name says

So what is that magic timer in my menubar? There are certainly many applications out there to help us to keep track of our time — I use TimeLog and love it for it’s simplicity. It’s very easy to use, integrates seamlessly with iCal and the Addressbook and notifies me every 15 minutes via Growl about the amount of time I already spent. Check it out if you’re on the Mac as well — it also helps with billing your clients.

Invoicing? Billings.

Which leads us to another time-tracking enabled software: Billings 2.5 tracks time and generates great-looking invoices. What more does a freelancer need?

Wakoopa. What did I spent my time on?

An entirely different approach is called Wakoopa. Basically, it’s just another web2.0ish social application. But let me quote what they’re saying about themselves and explain why this could improve our productivity:

With Wakoopa you know what software you’ve been using, and how long you’ve been using it.

Wakoopa classifies applications and assigns them to categories. On my profile overview you can see a box on the right, it’s filled with a tag cloud containing those categories — terms like code, design, surf the web and doing some office tasks.

This is a short breakdown of what you’re probably spending your time on. But be careful when interpreting this statistic. When I’m coding, I have to switch to a browser to test my code — suddenly I’m browsing the web instead of coding. There’s many different ways of using the web and it makes a huge difference whether you’re browsing YouTube or doing research.

What is your experience with tools that track what you’re doing? Are you concerned about how much time you spend doing things and does a statistic at the end of the day motivate you to improve your way of working the next day?

Don’t forget to have a break after a certain amount of time — for example after 45–90 minutes of focussed activity — you cannot concentrate forever. Stand up and walk around, get a cup of coffee from the kitchen — oftentimes solutions to problems or creative new ideas for a project appear suddenly in your head when you’re doing something entirely different.