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Apart from the launch problems how was the product? It didn't show promise to me as it doesn't integrate into my work-flow. The way I track my time is by recor

by DenisM 17y ago

Apart from the launch problems how was the product? It didn't show promise to me as it doesn't integrate into my work-flow. The way I track my time is by recording the start time into a spreadsheet and then the end time. Later I tally up the number and not only record how much time I spent on project GeeTasks but also what work item I was doing. This is very disciplining and should help me plan future work with greater accuracy. For example, now I know that I spent 8.3 hours to localize my GeeTasks iPhone app into the first foreign language, 8 hours for second two languages and 2 hours for the fourth language - clearly I am getting better at this localization thing. My biggest problem is that sometimes I get excited about a project and dive in head-first without recording when I started on it. The end time is usually clear from source control logs, emails etc. As a reuslt I feel uneasy about accuracy of some of my project data and I feel it may taint all of it. So I was very excited about prospect of autmotically tracking everything that I did. Alas, RescueTime doesn't seem to help with that - it records in a given hour how much time was spent here or there. In other words it's too coarse for my goals as it does not allow tracking workitems. Given that the project tracking didn't work I could not evaluate the UI for it, but the regular tracking UI was not quite what I wanted to see - summary display was too coarse while the drill-down was too detailed with each few-second interval being reported.

diN0bot 17y ago
i totally agree, though i'd phrase it as: RescueTime is too granular, whereas i want something with low but abstract resolution. i manually track every hour of my day into categories such as startup, sleep, professional-fun, social, sports or waste. 1) some of these can't be tracked by computer usage; eg, sleep, social, sports and unprofessional-fun which includes making music and reading books. 2) when i'm doing work i don't want to sift through which websites i'm visiting. localhost:8000 could mean i'm doing startup work or i'm doing a professional-fun side0project. i visit hundreds of online blogs and APIs for help with coding, but i also procrastinate via hn. i use iCal to mark my time and leave notes, though i can see using a spreadsheet work as well if not tracking 100% of your time. i wrote python scripts to analyze my iCal files and create weekly stats and graphs: http://github.com/diN0bot/iCal-Analyzer http://github.com/diN0bot/iCal-Analyzer
- DenisM 17y ago
  Yes, I do have a problem with not tracking 100% of my time. It started when I still had a day job, so I was curious how much time per week I spent on my startup (as it turned out 21 hours/week, 20 LOC/hour). It worked well back then but now I need something more comprehensive to track all my time. Oh wait, I figured it out! You know whats needed? I need a low-bandwidth screen recorder that would run for the whole day. In the evening I would replay it at 10x and see what I was doing and properly account for it. I'm off to check if Camtasia or ScreenFlow can be coerced into low-fidelity...
  - diN0bot 17y ago
    ha, that's not bad, though it still has the problem of not accounting for: - non-computer time - conceptual activities (eg, tabbing between Eclipse, Terminal, Emacs and FF is all part of project A for these hours, and project B for those hours) i'd love to see a blog post or open source code if your project works out. good luck. edit: interesting you wanted to know time/wk and loc/hr i'd be curious to know more metrics people are interested in. personally, i like to see weekly deltas in addition to averages, as well as ratios between categories. i'm still figuring out the sweet stuff, tho. for instance, i haven't found "activity length" or "activity switching" useful, but i keep thinking it might be meaningful. finally, i sometimes also track my subjective states, eg satisfied, motivated, anxious, down, tired. it would be interesting to detect patterns in both activity and state and then see if they correlate. the ultimate goal is to determine what i can do to promote good states or lessen down time. i've worked on many projects in this area (mostly hobbies), including a full-time startup right now, so if this is an area you're interested in working in let me know.
    - DenisM 17y ago
      So the $100 Screenflow records screen at a rate of about 6.5 Mb/minute, 388Mb/hour or 4.6Gb for 12 hours. That's pretty good! There is no built-in way to replay at 10x speed, at least not without exporting. However, I can actually drag the slider along the timeline, so it's kind of manual playback. It works! I have already discovered that I spend 14 minutes banging out my previous reply in this thread. No wonder I don't have any time!

by DenisM 17y ago

diN0bot 17y ago

i totally agree, though i'd phrase it as: RescueTime is too granular, whereas i want something with low but abstract resolution. i manually track every hour of my day into categories such as startup, sleep, professional-fun, social, sports or waste. 1) some of these can't be tracked by computer usage; eg, sleep, social, sports and unprofessional-fun which includes making music and reading books. 2) when i'm doing work i don't want to sift through which websites i'm visiting. localhost:8000 could mean i'm doing startup work or i'm doing a professional-fun side0project. i visit hundreds of online blogs and APIs for help with coding, but i also procrastinate via hn. i use iCal to mark my time and leave notes, though i can see using a spreadsheet work as well if not tracking 100% of your time. i wrote python scripts to analyze my iCal files and create weekly stats and graphs: http://github.com/diN0bot/iCal-Analyzer http://github.com/diN0bot/iCal-Analyzer

DenisM 17y ago
Yes, I do have a problem with not tracking 100% of my time. It started when I still had a day job, so I was curious how much time per week I spent on my startup (as it turned out 21 hours/week, 20 LOC/hour). It worked well back then but now I need something more comprehensive to track all my time. Oh wait, I figured it out! You know whats needed? I need a low-bandwidth screen recorder that would run for the whole day. In the evening I would replay it at 10x and see what I was doing and properly account for it. I'm off to check if Camtasia or ScreenFlow can be coerced into low-fidelity...
- diN0bot 17y ago
  ha, that's not bad, though it still has the problem of not accounting for: - non-computer time - conceptual activities (eg, tabbing between Eclipse, Terminal, Emacs and FF is all part of project A for these hours, and project B for those hours) i'd love to see a blog post or open source code if your project works out. good luck. edit: interesting you wanted to know time/wk and loc/hr i'd be curious to know more metrics people are interested in. personally, i like to see weekly deltas in addition to averages, as well as ratios between categories. i'm still figuring out the sweet stuff, tho. for instance, i haven't found "activity length" or "activity switching" useful, but i keep thinking it might be meaningful. finally, i sometimes also track my subjective states, eg satisfied, motivated, anxious, down, tired. it would be interesting to detect patterns in both activity and state and then see if they correlate. the ultimate goal is to determine what i can do to promote good states or lessen down time. i've worked on many projects in this area (mostly hobbies), including a full-time startup right now, so if this is an area you're interested in working in let me know.
  - DenisM 17y ago
    So the $100 Screenflow records screen at a rate of about 6.5 Mb/minute, 388Mb/hour or 4.6Gb for 12 hours. That's pretty good! There is no built-in way to replay at 10x speed, at least not without exporting. However, I can actually drag the slider along the timeline, so it's kind of manual playback. It works! I have already discovered that I spend 14 minutes banging out my previous reply in this thread. No wonder I don't have any time!