I find myself constantly feeling like I don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do (mostly on the home front). To try to get a handle on things I’d like to get an idea where my time goes. My hope is to fully track all my time for 2-4 weeks. Any recommendations on apps/ workflows that might help our with the tracking?
Once I know where my time is going I’d like to use something to track the things I want to get done. OmniFocus seems to be the go to todo app but it seems like it might be a bit overkill for managing tasks around the house, thoughts? Any other apps to consider?
It may be overkill for home projects but I’ve found it best to have all my projects, professional and personal, in one bucket. Here is a screenshot of my folder structure.
I would love to use OmniFocus for my work tasks. Unfortunately, I don’t think my company would be onboard with syncing data in the Cloud (that assumes I could install the Mac app without admin privileges which means I’d be limited to the iPhone application.
The web version of OmniFocus is coming, so that might be an option.
As far as time tracking goes, I use Toggl (largely imitating folks like Myke Hurley and CGP Grey). There are some things I don’t like about it, but it has a well featured free tier and it gets the job done.
For tracking where your time goes, look into Timing. It can be calibrated to suit your defined buckets or projects, pick up events from calendars, and let you record activities in the real world when away from your computer. MacOS only.
I love Timing too. I’m terrible at starting and stopping timers, I just let it run in the background and at the end of the day, assign tasks to the blocks and then upload to Teamwork. I tried Toggl and it drove me nuts!
I’m going to suggest an old school method. Create a simple spreadsheet with a column for each day and each row is a 15 minute time block for your longest awake time, or if you want it finer then use 6 minute time block. Print it out and edit on paper every hour with what you actually did. Or update the spreadsheet every hour.
Once you see where your time goes then you can decide if you are ok with that.
I am a huge fan of Omnifocus and I use it as my task and project manager for nearly everything. But i have discovered that I run off the end of the capabilities of most simpler software and I hate the time and effort spent switching apps and learning the new one. I’ve been on OF since early 2009. My implementation has changed over the years but the tool is still perfect for me.
