This trial has been a long time coming. There were too many days and weeks throughout this year alone which seemed to pass by in a blur. While far from perfect, keeping track of what I’m doing throughout a day has given me some insight into where exactly that time is going. Tying in a rough calendar of my planned day, I can see where the disconnect is.
Expectations
My goal for this trial is to get a better grasp on my time. What am I doing with it.
Time is our most precious resource. Once it’s spent, that’s it. There’s no getting back lost time. Having a feeling that it’s slipping by without notice started to get me depressed and frustrated. Too many times I looked back and thought, “what did I even do in all that time?”
Keeping track of that time will give me a record of where that time was, in fact, spent. However, even more importantly, it can tell me when I’m spending time in a way I don’t want to. Realizing this, I can work on systems to push myself to work on what I have planned at a given moment.
My Tool of Choice
After researching a few options, I came across an app called Clockify. It’s about 90% of what I’m looking for, but has some issues that dock it that 10%.
In general, the app is pretty simple. Press start timer, and it begins. There are features for “clients” and “projects” which I use to somewhat organize categories. It’s really designed for contractors to manage how their spending their time while working, hence the language.
The real feature that drew me to the app, that I can’t seem to find anywhere else, is that through another app called Zapier, an automation tool. Timers can be exported to Google Calendar. I do all of my planning there, so I found this to be perfect. Unfortunately, there seems to be some issue with Zapier finding any of my timers past May 28th, a bug that is hopefully fixed. I really like the idea of seeing my timers and plan next to each other in the same place. Until then, I’ll just have to piece together what I can. The in app reports aren’t really useful, as they focus on how much time is spent overall, not when a timer when running.
I did enter a support ticket while thinking about this, maybe someone can help me out and we can tackle that last 10% to what I’m looking for.
Current Takeaways
What have I learned already? What am I doing with that knowledge?
In the short time I’ve been time tracking, I’m surprised by one thing, I spend my time pretty naturally. With starting, I was expecting to adapt to keeping track of time, thus paying more attention to my actions in a given moment. Similar to how I approached food when meal tracking and fasting.
Having this natural habit still gives me better insights into what I can do. For example, I have a bad habit of sticking on a given task or project too long. Not let me finish this thought long, but uh-oh, it’s 2 AM long. This is particularly true with video games, who saw that coming?
Setting some time aside to decompress is nice, and games are a great way to do that. However, recently, I’ve found myself spending far too much time playing. I have some ideas from simple to extreme to curb this. The simple starts with an alarm to remind me when it’s time to stop. The extreme consists of plugging my computer into an automated timer plug and having it power down at a given time.
Perhaps next time, I’ll touch a bit more on systems and what I do for planning. But would you look at the time.
Trying Out Before Buying In 