Sam Gentle.com

Always be timing

For ages now I've been using time tracking for projects I'm working on. I mentioned it in the context of the lack of good tooling for tracking personal metrics, but the graph that I made for that article was pretty reflective of the kind of value I got from time tracking. Being able to know which projects are taking up the most time, what general categories they fall into, and what my general workload is like was immensely helpful.

But lately I've begun to realise that what I really want to know is: where is all of my time going? It sometimes seems like there's a lot of it and sometimes seems like there's nearly none. In the context of that problem, I've realised that one of the most important things to track isn't my time working on things, but my time not working on things.

So to fix that I've decided on a simple system: just always be timing. Track time for projects, track time having fun, track time asleep, and, most importantly, track time not doing any of those things. This should result in a full 24 hours of time tracked each day, with no ambiguity about where time has gone. If there are any obvious time sinks, they should present themselves pretty clearly in the data.

Partly this idea is thanks to Toggl, which made the interesting design decision to let you start tracking time without having to enter what you're tracking time for. So I can just start an unnamed time entry and describe it later, which is essential for the kind of miscellaneous time I'm looking to isolate.

I'll follow up a week from now with whatever insights I've gleaned from this experiment. At that point I should be well placed to decide whether to keep doing it based on how useful it was and how much effort it took.