
My 2017 timesheet; I have 100% time tracking for the last 24 months - kfrzcode
https://infogram.com/2016-vs-2017-time-breakdown-1h7j4d0x7lyd2nr
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kfrzcode
I use basic calendaring tools like iCal or Google Calendar to manually track
my historical data, silo'd into 12 different calendars which represent
categories of time spent. I've become comfortable enough in the software
interface to only spend ~3-5m day updating. This time investment is acceptable
for now, I haven't found the right solution to automate the entirety of this
data collection accurately.

In this view (historical calendar) I simply want to have a log/journal for
each day which I can reference in the future. I don't want to write the
details of my D&D session with friends on the calendar, I just want to know we
played D&D and where we did it. If there ARE things I want to recall, I can
put them in the notes field with ease.

I group together by color for at-a-glance insights. Blue = daily routines,
health & wellness. Red = purely escapism or distraction from my goal. Green =
goal-oriented work or billable work. .

When I'm working on devices I have RescueTime Premium installed which gives me
a high granularity look on how I spend my screen-time. I have the luxury of
being a self-employed developer and thus can more or less direct my energy
into what interests me and also make money doing so, but as many of you may
know this takes discipline and self-awareness.

Problems I've found include centralized goal-setting, task planning and in-
tool time metrics. There have been some solutions out there that haven't
really succeeded. GCal has actually made great strides this past year in
improving their core product overall... I still don't think its perfect but
that's obviously subjective. Big thanks to your team, if you're reading this.

I like low-friction, high-flexibility tools. I'd love to build a more detailed
"continuous integration for humans," but I'm not ready to share any of that
work yet it's all in ideation phase and needs revision before publishing.

To accomplish this I keep calendars for around 10 categories of what I spend
my time doing. It's created a nice dataset useful to basically me.

I also use a Huginn installation in my server rack (a laptop on my bookshelf
lol) to automate things like Harvest time tracking into calendar items and
some other business-logic level tasks. I hope to explore more of this in 2018!

All in all it's an experiment in self awareness. The rough hypothesis is that
if I'm collecting more data about myself I'll become more self aware of
positive and negative behavior patterns. Certainly this isn't a new concept,
but with the ease of collection I don't see a reason to stop or slow down.

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jdmoreira
Can you elaborate on your data collection? What devices and software did you
use? I would like to try it myself :)

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tenken
You should exercise alot more.

