I work from home and have been having a hard time staying on task lately. I find myself browsing this forum or news or Reddit from time to time, and I also like to procrastinate by looking at different tools, apps, workflows. Something I’m sure no one on here knows anything about
I’ve tried using time tracking/pomodoro in the past but I have issues with each one.
The pomodoro doesn’t really work for me because I work with code, databases etc, and usually around the 25 minute mark I’m just hitting my stride. When the bell goes off it totally takes me out of the loop and ruins my flow. 25 mins is way too short.
Time tracking is okay (I am using Timery/Toggl), but I often forget to start/stop timers when needed. Once I miss a timer or two I end up giving up on time tracking and get discouraged. I find toggling things on and off all the time frustrating. I also love it when the work day is over and a while later Timery emails me – “you still have a timer running”.
I thought I heard David mention a time tracker app on a recent podcast and I remember thinking “wait, he’s not using Timery?”. But I don’t recall what it was.
But I don’t think I need a new app per se. I need a different method for staying on task. Neither of the above have stuck well after a few iterations on each. I’m open to other suggestions.
I have the same issue with 25 minute pomodoros. 90 minutes with a 15 minute walking break have worked better. The walking keeps me from losing the plot, for some reason, and gives me lots of longer-horizon eye rest. 3-4 of those cycles fly by when immersed in a problem.
I find it hard to get going, but once I get immersed in something I find it hard to get up and walk away and take breaks when I should. I often think “I’ll stop once I’ve solved why this isn’t working” when the issue could take hours to resolve. And in the midst of all that, I rarely remember to turn whatever timer I have running on or off when I should.
I think it will also help when my kids go back to school. They are both a bit older now so they know not to barge in when I’m working, but knowing they’re around and in other rooms changes the dynamic.
I’ve used Numbers. The approach requires manual coordination to set up the time blocks. I’ve found that setting activities within time blocks over three or four hour increments is my best approach.
Do you have to be online to work? If not, add some friction to reconnecting to the Internet. Disable your computer at your router and/or move your ethernet cable to another room, etc.
Having to get up from your desk might be just enough to focus your attention.
There’s an app called QBserve, I’m using it all the time (it automatically tracks your time on apps, websites etc and then categorizes it automatically, so no need to stop start the timers all the time). You can configure it to your liking, lots of options, invoicing, and best of all - one time purchase for 30$ afair.
The biggest con to this for me is it’s MacOS only😢
I am the same, and I thought it was worthwhile for me to preface my answer by acknowledging that. The friction of getting started (especially if it’s a task I don’t want to do!) shouldn’t be underestimated! I also suffer from what appears to be a common issue among many people that I have observed online in other forums: “I have a meeting in 3 hours therefore the day is ruined and I can’t do any deep work”. I have to actively fight against the inclination to fritter away those 3 hours on low-value tasks (still need doing, just not high priority) instead of committing the time to something deep. As I think a few people have hinted at here, I don’t like getting interrupted and losing my stride once I’m in something and that can stop me doing big tasks.
On to your problem, I think you’re really raising two issues (to my mind): time-tracking, and productivity.
Time-tracking
For time-tracking, I also use Toggl. I think don’t give up with it just yet, but I question the level of detail you’re putting in it. I would quickly go mad if I wrote down every task that I was doing in it. I just cannot be bothered. I have I think 5-8 areas of my role that I’ve defined, and I only log that level of detail in Toggl. They’re unique to my job and my organisation, so sharing my examples won’t mean anything to you, but e.g. I have “admin” for admin tasks, “tech” for when I’m working on tech issues, then categories for my actual work (science stuff). I use a standard description, project and tag for each area, which means they autopopulate when I start typing them in Toggl. Very occasionally, I decide I want to track time to a specific “project” (general term, not Toggl term). When this happens, I choose a standard name, assign the tag for the right area of work, and then that autopopulates. E.g. let’s say I’m working on a project about oranges and I want to track that as part of my area called fruit. Normally all fruit time is just logged as “fruit” in Toggl, but now I will create “oranges” as a description, tag it as “fruit” and use that until my project is completed. That way, I can report on how much time was spent on oranges, but I can still see how much time went to fruit.
This is fairly easy to administer I find, and it’s easier to backfill if you forget to do it in a real-time (as I often do!). By the way, on a Mac make sure you’ve enabled seeing the Toggl info in your menu bar. Then you can see if a timer is running and what you’ve said you’re working on.
The reason I track this (my employer doesn’t care), is so that I can see where one area of my work is getting more time, and I can decide if this is ok or needs re-balancing.
Productivity
I agree with you re: pomodoro. 25 mins is not enough time to work on something. I want nice big blocks. I play around with this a lot, and feel quite happy doing so (I’m not especially bothered that I haven’t settled on One Process To Rule Them All). I currently have two apps I use to set timers for myself: Llama Life (love it - make a to-do list and allocate times for each task, then run it - I run it on my Mac as an open window), and Bluebird Focus Timer (good for setting a big chunk of time with a countdown timer and a background noise - I run this on my iPhone next to me and visible). A month ago I added a new toy to the mix: a timer cube (this one from Amazon). I thought it was just a silly purchase, but it’s turned out to be very satisfying to just flip the cube over and start working on a task. I use it with the vibrate setting so the noise is subtle when the time is up and doesn’t bother me. I often just flip it over to restart and carry on.
I also do interstitial journaling on days when I need help focusing or am stuck on a problem. I find talking to myself (which is basically all interstitial journaling is) is quite good for re-focusing and also identifying what a problem might be and how to work at it. Doing this can be useful in other ways, for example I might end up recording a new issue I’ve identified with a piece of work which colleagues need to address, or I figure out how to do something and now have a little log of how I did it.
I used Timery and Toggle for a long time and also sometimes forgot to start the tasks. I have started using Timemator (https://timemator.com). It is one of those apps that records what apps you are using, and you can then review and allocate them against client work or tasks. It also allows you to set up triggers. For example, I have one for LinkedIn, so it automatically tracks as soon as I hit the site.
In my case, it has two advantages over Toggle and Timery. The first is the obvious one: You are more likely to record your time accurately. The second is that it shows just how much time you have wasted on sites and apps - that it quite scary!
The con is that it records everything you do.
It syncs via iCloud and does so through an encrypted connection. Here is their privacy policy Timemator | Privacy Policy.
It has saved me a couple fo times already. Look out for offers, I bought it at 50% off
“I’ll do that task after the meeting, since the meeting ruined my plans today” (meeting ends) “I need to collect my thoughts about what happened in the meeting. I wrote the notes in OneNote but I should have typed them maybe? Nah, better to hand write for recall. Now look at the time, my shift ends in 90 minutes – oooh, email.”
Good advice all around thanks . I work from a Windows computer so the taskbar tip won’t really work, but I could maybe set it to keep my iPad screen on when a timer is running in Timery. I use that to track my time and do some peripheral work stuff.
Thank you thank you thank you for introducing me to Llama Life. I love it! Something has just ‘clicked’ with the way I like to work. I suspect I will continue to use it after the free trial. I might pay for a month and see if it sticks. So far so good!
Not sure what type of time tracking you need… I also use QBserve, which is great to track time automatically (it runs in the background).
But it seems you need a timer more that you need a tracker. Have you had a look at Vitamin-R? It’s targeted towards people with ADHD, but I think it may have all the features you want.
Timer: you set the length of each time slice (including pause time slices if you want), and the notifications you want (to see, hear, or both) before/during/at the end of each timeslice.
Tracking: you can enter whatever text you want at the beginning of each time slice, and this text gets logged with timestamps (start/finish/duration) for each timeslice in a logbook (.txt format)
It has a bunch of other features that you might not need (multiple notepads, level of focus tracking), so it may be a bit too fiddly for your taste.
EDIT: forgot to mention it also has an iPhone version.
I have to measure my life in six-minute increments, and have spent the better part of my life trying to figure out how to most efficiently track and use time. Following is a random smattering of time tracking habits and hacks that may be of interest to you. (As I read it, it comes off as a little preachy, but I don’t mean it that way. These are just meant to be ideas that may help get your creative ideas flowing.)
I have only one prescriptive piece of advice. If you are committed to tracking time, track it as close to the happening of the event as possible. Usually, if you can log your time at the end of the day or first thing the next morning, you’ll end up with a pretty accurate calculation.
Tracking time and staying on task are two different skill sets / disciplines. Some time ago, I found myself switching up my GTD routine because my system would get bogged down. Then it finally dawned on me that my problem was not my GTD system. System was doing its job. I wasn’t executing. So, I made a rule that I needed to check off every task I’ve marked a certain way (maybe it’s all tasks for “today”) before I could move on to something else. It still takes discipline, but I found that when I had a concrete, objective standard it made the doing part easy.
When I have ten things that I could do and not one of them is a priority, I used to spin my wheels trying to figure out which one to do or I’d waste time doing something un-productive but that didn’t require me to make a decision. One thing that helped me, was just picking and not over thinking it. They all have to get done, I’m the person who put them on the list, so why should I care what sequence I work on them. That has been the single biggest change in my life that reduced wasting time for me.
My experience with using timers to track time is just like yours. I forget to start and stop. I find it’s much easier to either log time immediately after you do something, or use a set of tools that automatically track some aspect of the time you are trying to record. For example, if I’m writing a document, I’ll start by creating a blank document and find the elapsed time by looking at the creation time and the last saved time.
Another helpful hack in terms of the mechanics of time tracking, if your work entails a lot of emailing. When you start your e-mail session, note the time. When you are done with your e-mail session, note the time. Then you can use the time stamps on the emails to detail out your time.
By far the best method of time tracking I ever used was carrying around a spiral notebook that was about 5”x8”. I’d put the date at the top of the page each morning, and then I’d write down all the times I started-stopped working on a thing. At the end of the day, I’d sum up the time and probably had the most accurate time records ever.
Another useful tip for realistically managing your time—as opposed to aspirationally managing it—is to track your time non-judgmentally over a two week period. If you “wasted” two hours scrolling X or Instagram, track it and don’t be upset with yourself. I put “wasted” in quotation marks because I am referring to time that you meant to use for something else. I’m not suggesting that scrolling social media is always a waste of time Nothing is a waste of your time, if you are being intentional about how you use it. After your two-week tracking project, analyze the results, see if you can tease out any patterns. Then build your budget around how you actually use your time, instead of how you think some productivity champ would do it. Work incrementally on fixing things, rather than trying to recreate yourself by force.
One last hack that worked for me, when not dealing with client time records. Instead of tracking things very granularity, I categorized things I was doing into bigger categories. Then, I’d track time by category, rather than being overly precise about the specific activity. That works well when you don’t need exacting precision in what you are tracking: hobby time; spiritual time; free time; family time; project time; etc. You can set broad time budgets, and examine how close you are to your budget. This works great using ATracker Pro (see below), the app that I use.
Your needs may not require such accuracy. But maybe some of these ramblings will spark your creativity. Time tracking and calorie tracking are two chores that are simply not natural or enjoyable, and they require this absurd level of fastidiousness. That said, if you can stick with it, I think it pays dividends.
Not to push you to another app, but to add this here to the discussion, i use ATracker pro for my personal time tracking. For work we use a specialized system (iTimeKeep), but I often use ATracker Pro as a personal log that I then migrate to our work system. It doesn’t work quite as well as my old spiral notebook system, but it’s close.
One last thing, I’m not sure if it’s been talked about much here, but there is a book called The 12-Week Year. I listened to the audiobook and was actually angry with it at first, but I wanted to give it a fair listen. I made it through the book, and it started to seem like it actually made some sense. I tried it out, and man I’m glad I listened to the book. The methodology works with any other time management system you use, but it really supercharged me. I got a few things done from my list — big things — that were just kind of languishing. I even finished some major life goals, like learning Ancient Greek—employing the 12-week year. It’s a pretty good method for enabling yourself to stay on task.
Hope some of this helps! Good luck on this journey.
I thought I heard David mention a time tracker app on a recent podcast and I remember thinking “wait, he’s not using Timery?”. But I don’t recall what it was.
Maybe Timing? He’s mentioned it before. I like Timery as an app, but I struggle to remember to start/stop timers as well, so I’ve been considering trying Timing since it’s relatively automatic.
Funny that this comes up now. I’ve been tracking every minute of my work time for the past 17 years (using various apps, most revent was Toggl with timery). But last week I decided to stop. It was a hard decision that I contemplated before but I never made the move because it felt too risky not to have that data. But last week I finally pulled the trigger. I can’t say yet whether I’ll go back or not, but for now it feels liberating to not have this meta-layer of thinking about what I’m doing (and tracking it) and just doing stuff.
Part of the good feel is undoubtedly coming from me now being able to believe that I am working enough (and the right things). After all, the main reason why I continued time-tracking for so long was that it forced me to be aware of what I was doing at any minute. And at the end of the day, I had to face the truth. Sometimes the truth was comforting (because I clocked more hours than average) but sometimes the truth just added to my frustration of not getting (enough) stuff done and I think it was this negative feedback that eventually helped me to pull the trigger and let go of this way of working, at least for now.
The main reason, however, was that I no longer want to obsess about the quantity of my work as measured in hours and try to focus more on deep work, both because it is productive and because it is emotionally rewarding, To do that, i.e. to value the value I created, not the time I spent creating it, I need to let go of the number of hours. At least for now.
. I work from a Windows computer so the taskbar tip won’t really work, but I could maybe set it to keep my iPad screen on when a timer is running in Timery. I use that to track my time and do some peripheral work stuff.