637: Digging Deep on Tracking Time

Episodes
35

Time tracking is a pipe dream for me, kind of like planning. I have a lot tasks where I kick off a an automated process and I have to wait x minutes to see if it completes successfully.

While I am waiting for that task to complete, I might work on something else on my laptop, leave to do something around the house, etc.

Then I have those tasks where it could take minutes or a few days as I’ve never dinner done it before and part of the task if figuring out how to do it. Usually that is trying to pieces together posts on forums, wiki’s, man pages, etc . There is never a complete answer, so I stitch things together along with some trial and error!

Maybe after my relative new home is setup how I’d like to give some stability, I can plan and time track better.

That is just for personal tasks. Work is even more chaotic as it’s a mix of planned and unplanned work. heck, sometimes it’s a project manager who pops in to interrupt my planned sprint work for a higher priority. Oh, we just found this bug in that software we deployed last week. We need you to roll back a few thousand systems to the previous version. oh , ok. I guess I’ll stop working on my current task then.

36

I would give Timely (https://timelyapp.com) a look - works on Windows and Mac, and (if you want) it can log your location on an iPhone. It has been great for me. It has a bunch of stuff you can add on for team or project tracking, but I just use the most basic version and it does all I need.

37

Hee Hee! :smile: very funny

38

Update on Syncing with Timery.

I set up Timery app on Monterey - iPhone and iPad.

I also set up a few simple Siri shortcuts to start and stop the timers.

I used use Siri shortcuts on the iPhone to start and stop them.

The results are that it seems as though the three versions of the app do sync (at least while they are Open and visible).

But here is the problem: I set up widgets on the iPhone and for iPad for Timery. These are the problem because they do not seem to update quickly at all - especially if the app is not currently open on the device, so you cannot rely on them.

I also noticed that if I started a timer on one device - and then needed to open the app on the other Device - then I can see that when it opens you see it’s spinning while it is currently syncing - and then it becomes current and so does the widget.

So it seems that this is possibly more related to Apple sync/widgets than the app and maybe we might not rely on the widgets for now.

39

Hi, I liked this episode and have been inspired to try and track my time. I have Timery and Toggl, but ran into the sand as I kept forgetting to start and stop timers.

If I can automate or simplify starting and stopping timers, I think I can make it work for me, and would definitely appreciate the reality check from time to time to see how much time certain actives actually take!!

I now have a better structure for my timers but I’m having a few problems. I’ve listened to the podcast twice but can’t figure out how David uses shortcuts to launch timers. I think he said he had a shortcut for each saved timer? I imagine I’ll have 12-20 timers when I’m finished to it should be very simple to have a shortcut for each of my saved timers, or the most important ones. I might link it to the stream deck when I get it working.

Does anyone have a shortcut to launch a saved timer? I’ve spent a few hours (must do a training on shortcuts!!) but can’t seem to get it working. If someone has a simple, few steps shortcut they would be willing to share, I can adapt, amend.

Enjoying being part of this community - learning a lot. Thanks all!

40

From what I understand from the discussion in the episode, David and Stephen talked about how the Shortcuts actions that Timery provides make starting and stopping timers much easier than using Shortcuts to communicate directly with the Toggl API. They discussed how there are really only a limited number of timers that they use to track the broader areas of where they spend their time.

Here is a Shortcut I built to demonstrate how you can use a menu tree to select specific timers to start. I used my part of my own PhD projects/descriptions as an example. Feel free to use it and modify it however you want to.

Additionally, like you said, you can have a single Shortcut to launch a timer and then assign the Shortcut to your Stream Deck. Here is an example of what Stephen was saying about how Timery makes the Shortcut literally become one action.

If you’re using Timery then you first need to make sure that you have the app downloaded on the appropriate device and that you are signed into the app with your Toggl credentials.

I personally find it most helpful to just track everything so that I’m not trying to decide whether or not I should be tracking my time. So I have specific projects, descriptions, and tags for work that requires it, but then I just have generic “family time” and “sleep” projects for when I’m not actively concerned about how I spend my time so that I don’t need to worry about stoping a timer. If I’m curious later then I can also compare more specifically how I spend my work-life-sleep balance.

Finally, for anyone else that might be interested. Federico Viticci has publicly available Shortcuts in his Shortcuts Archive for time tracking with Toggl using the API directly (which is what I do).

Hopefully this is helpful for you.

1 Like
41

Garett,
thanks for your through reply, fantastic!
I’ll get on and download the various links and this will give me more than enough to create my system!
I’ll post in a while what I’ve decided to do.
Joe

1 Like
42

Thanks for the episode. It inspired me to try Timely’s free trial. The automatic time tracking is a nice feature to assist with end of day recall but not worth a monthly subscription. The automatic tracking is only so good if, like me, one is constantly jumping from task to task.

My next trial will be purchasing Timery and using it in conjunction with another (free hopefully) activity tracker.

Also, I came across a program called Clockify. On first glance it seems to do it all and for FREE. Must be a catch. Curious what David and Stephen think about Clockify…

43

I don’t know about tags. But timing enables you to use keywords in its rules: " all the keywords extracted from the app activity’s title and path." per Rules In-Depth – Timing Time Tracker

44

When you hear someone saying that they work 60 hours a week, they are probably not using Timing. Or they have a very loose concept of ‘work’.

I have been using Timing extensively for many years, and I love its automatic visual timeline feature. I still use an intentional component ( mySelfQuantifier), but one could use Timing’s timers (and also add data in Timing fields) to mark the transition between tasks.

I agree with what Dave said here and/or in the episode with Ryan JA Murphy: no one size fits all. And it would be very difficult to directly assess the effects and benefits of time-tracking, because (e.g.) it requires setting up a habit, which of course takes time to develop. Most cognitive psychological studies are very low effort for participants: show up in the lab, do an activity, go away; maybe come back later for another test, usually not. So recruiting for this would be hard. And you’d get a major selection bias (not an irrelevant one, however). Still, I’d love to see more work on this.

Having said that, there are very strong general empirical grounds for time tracking and for intentionality in time-tracking. And ethically: if one is billing clients “by the hour” one really has to track time precisely.

Cal Newport goes on about using paper and pencil for time tracking. But this really does not scale very well (for many, perhaps most knowledge workers who do a lot of work on their Macs), and IMO it shows that the Deep Work book goes too far towards simplicity. (But that is a different subject)

Actually, one of the major points of Timing app as far as I am concerned is its automatic visual timeline. So it can help you overcome cases where you forget to start the timer.

45

This should perhaps go in a separate topic, but still directly related to Digging Deep on Tracking Time episode: today David Alm of Timing and I ( CogSci Apps) were delighted to announce that Timing is now a URL-friendly and compatible with Hook. The first step here is being able to get URLs to projects and hook them to anything. Daniel did a great job, and so the AppleScript one needs for this couldn’t be simpler .

How simple is the AppleScript?Well we just needed to add this to Hook’s get address script:

tell application "Timing"

return "[" & title of current selection & "](" & link to current selection & ")"

end tell

Timing’s new API opens up a lot of possibilities. You can now connect your projects to what they are about, such as projects in one’s personal project management app ( OmniFocus, TaskPaper, Things, etc.), Finder files/folders, DEVONthink stuff, etc.; whether one pastes them or ‘hooks’ them. Lack of this is something that had bothered me for many years.

So I am truly delighted that Daniel Alm added this API for linking Timing projects to and from anything. ( Timing 2022.2)

2 Likes
46

I’m not using Timing and I have no desire to track my time. My calendar is essentially my time tracker. :slightly_smiling_face:

I can’t speak for others but I can without hesitation say that I often work 60 hours a week and I don’t time track—my calendar is proof. I’d rather not work 60 hours/week but it is the nature of my job as the head of a private school—lots of early morning and late evening work projects and events to attend. Example, last week I had five evenings out giving presentations (Monday-Friday) from 7:00 to 9:00pm not counting travel time to and from the events, all connected with a $25M campaign and my days always start at about 6am in the office. I’m not complaining but some professions really do require long weeks. :slightly_smiling_face:

47

Definitely it’s easier for some types of jobs to get an informal handle on the number of hours. For many types of work, it’s easy to over-estimate and also to underestimate time spent working, and also the impact of the hours. David mentioned using a tag called “moving the needle”. Another possible tag is “Deep work”. Trying to use “deep work” as a tag helped me think about the concept (it’s a tough one… separate topic). There’s research (though not specifically on time-tracking) that self-reports are extremely error prone. People make a lot of errors even reporting what they were just doing a few minutes ago.

1 Like
48

This is where I think I’d find the real value in time tracking. Not as a way of recording what I did per se, but as a way of developing a better understanding of how long it might take me to do that same thing the next time I have to do it.

Even after more than 15 years of relying heavily on GTD to help me make decisions about what to do next at work each hour of the day, I still don’t have what I’d consider a confident grasp of how long it will take me to get many things done, particularly when I’m considering an arbitrary lineup of tasks and projects requiring multiple possible combinations of levels of effort and deadlines during any given stretch of time.

It would be useful to have some actual data to consider for a change instead of doing a lot of guessing.

1 Like
49

:slightly_smiling_face: if I wasn’t logging it I’d forget what I ate yesterday. :joy:

2 Likes
50

Timing now has a preference When a video call ends. You can set it to Do nothing.

51

Thank you. I also should have replied back that I reached out to support, and the developer not only pointed me to that setting (which I somehow looked right past), but he also offered to try to come up with a custom solution if I wanted to be prompted after finishing video calls but not after finishing calls with my VOIP app. I forget the specifics, but I think it would have involved me taking a log and sending it in.

1 Like
52

Oooh, this sounds very similar to a problem I’m trying to solve! I do want it to pop with a prompt for calls via MS Teams, but I don’t want it to prompt for “calls” via Discord (which are almost always just me listening to a live-streamed podcast!)

It sounds like I should reach out to their support :slight_smile:

1 Like
53

I’ve been tracking all my work-time for over 15 years with a couple of different apps and one thing that has always been important for me is to have my task-management app connected to the time-tracking app so that I don’t have to create the same task hierarchy twice - one for task management and one for time-tracking.

Since David and Stephen didn’t even mention the relationship between time-tracking and task-management, I assume they have a different approach and the podcast inspired me to reconsider the benefits of integrated task-management and time-tracking. But I’m still reluctant.

Any thoughts on this?

2 Likes
54

Whole heartedly agree and would add a couple of further points. If tasks can be given time estimates, then it becomes possible to compare that estimate to the actual time taken as recorded by time tracking — that’s fundamental to improving estimation of future tasks.

Second, I view task management as an adjunct to project management. Defining tasks is a top-down process of decomposing larger scale activities into smaller and smaller ones until you reach the stage of actionable units of work. Tasks are the individual units of work allocated to me.

The fact is, however, that it’s only when you come to execute a task that you fully understand what you, personally, actually need to do. An automated time tracker — something like Timings — integrated with a task manager could capture both the total time spent “on task” and the elapsed time (start to finish) of the task. Both are really useful to know. Working on Task A, I did X, Y and started Z, then I took a phone call about Task Q on another project, before completing Z.

Handling Q is important; even those with the strictest rules on time blocking, handling emails etc. — count me out, I just can’t be that disciplined — have must have some interruptions. If there’s a deadline, you need to allow time for them.

Years ago in the drilling industry we used a four way classification of time. Tasks were either planned or unplanned, productive or non-productive; “productive” meaning contributing towards the objective of the activity to which the task belonged. Planned & Productive was good; Unplanned & Productive was Ok, it was a failure of planning that could be investigated. Planned & Unproductive was a necessary evil — scheduled maintenance, waiting on weather, stuff like that. Finally, Unplanned & Unproductive was the devil’s spawn — mechanical breakdowns, waiting on equipment and rework.

The whole lot tied into what was pompously called “continuous process improvement”, in reality a blame game between operator and drilling contractor of who should carry the cost of unproductive time and drilling engineers trying to find “external factors” by which to justify it. Nevertheless, in a less antagonistic environment it’s a very good tool for identifying how time was used and how and where things can be made more efficient.

3 Likes