Experiment: Time Tracking

Over the last few months I've been catching up with the Cortex podcast which focuses on productivity in the digital age amongst other things. One of the hosts often talks about time tracking and its benefits.

So I thought I'd try it out for a week.

What I Wanted Out of Time Tracking

Before starting, I decided I wanted two things to come out of the experiment:

See where my time was going
Be more mindful of how I spend my time

The first item was the result of me coming home from work one too many times thinking to myself "what the hell did I do with my time today?"

The second item was more general and something I've thought about over the years - making an effort to spend time "consciously" rather than "unconsciously". It can be all too easy to lose yourself in mindless tasks like browsing Reddit where you can't put a finger on exactly how long you'd been doing the thing, but don't feel that you've gotten anything out of it.

Methodology

The system I decided to use wasn't the result of much research. I started with the base of using Toggl, which allows you to start and stop timers connected to "projects" so you can see how much time you spent on each (I used the desktop and iPhone app versions). I defined a set of projects for myself which weren't all actual projects. These boiled down to:

Commute - getting to and from work
Socializing - chatting with people in the office not about work
Communication - general tasks like reading/writing emails, catching up on message threads, etc.
Tomfoolery - looking at random tech sites on my computer, playing with my phone, etc.
Bodily Functions - bathroom breaks and eating/snacking
Exercise - I go to the gym every day before lunch
Meta-Work - setting things up at my desk, cleaning my work area, planning out my day, etc.
Meetings
Reviews/Teamwork - doing code reviews, reading design documents
Project work - this I broke down by actual work projects which I'm not going to name here. I had 4 separate work projects I worked on during the experiment

Along with the activity breakdown, I set up a few rules for myself:

Tracking hours - Track all time from getting in my car to go to work to entering my garage on my return home
Log everything - Every time I context switch, no matter how long, log the change. Even if I only switched for a few seconds.
Priority - If something qualified for more than one activity, log it for the more general one. For example, a meeting for Project A would be tracked in the Meetings activity, and time spent writing an email for Project B would be tracked in the Communication category.

With these rules set up on Sunday, I set out on Monday to track my time.

Execution

Luckily for me, Toggl has an excellent desktop app that makes logging incredibly easy. Literally the press of a single button to switch, so the overhead of logging each switch was low. This ended up being important so that I would actually log each context switch.

This app, which I dedicated 1/3 of a mac OS Space to on my dual-monitor setup (or 1/6 when not connected to a monitor), along with the app made the process painless.

The only hitch on the execution phase was the awkward moment I'd spend deliberately pressing the Socializing button whenever someone came up to talk.

Results and Learnings

I learned more than I thought I would during this experiment. Some of this was meta-learned from thinking about tracking of time in general rather than directly from the tracking itself.

Below are my main take aways.

I get distracted a ton

All together, I had approximately 118 "interruptions" during the week that I recorded, and I believe I did not mark down many of them.

I broke down my distractions to five sources:

Online, external - Notifications from emails, messages, tasks, etc.
In-person, external - People stopping by my desk
Internal - e.g. "I'm bored, I should check out Reddit!"
Obligations - Meetings
Bodily functions - You can figure this one out

Below is a very rough estimate of the numbers of distractions for each cause. Keep in mind that it is difficult to track each distraction accurately and I had to make some estimates.

Number of Distractions and Their cause

With these in mind I set about thinking about how I could decrease the frequency and length of each systemically:

Online, external - Disable all notifications, instead setting a time when I'd check if any message came in (e.g. only check on the hour). Almost all notifications can wait at least an hour.
In-person, external - This is the hardest of the bunch, and I could only come up with telling coworkers to bug me less (ineffective) or working from home. Both can be difficult.
Internal - A long struggle of mine, battling the inner ADD, this is a subject for a whole other entry here. This isn't as easily systemized out.
Obligations - RSVP "Yes" to fewer meetings, only attend what is needed and feel free to leave if the meeting isn't helpful.
Bodily functions - This one I let slide. Sometimes you just have to go. Sometimes you're just hungry.

Distractions are a topic I'll likely write about more at a later time and could easily fill an entry in itself. This is just scratching the surface.

I spend more (Relative) time than I thought working

Removing all the non-project and necessary communication/meeting time, the relative time I spend actively working is more than I thought.

The general timing broke down as:

Total time: 42:40* (31:25 without commute + exercise + bodily functions)
Project work: 20:43
Non-project work: 6:57 (meetings + communication + meta-work + team work)
"Wasted" time: 3:02 (socializing + tomfoolery)
Life overhead: 11:15 (commute + exercise + bodily functions)

*Admittedly this was a lighter work week than usual so the hours are low, but the ratios still apply.

Here's a visualization of my relative work amounts:

If you take out the "life overhead", the amount of work to wasted time actually looks favorable!

I Rarely Work in large, unbroken chunks of time

This is mostly the result of distractions and is the end-goal of reducing distractions. My ideal is to fill my day with as many uninterrupted chunks of time on single tasks so I don't incur the mental overhead hits of context switching.

Here's a graph showing how many of my entries were short, interrupted ones versus longer, uninterrupted ones:

Number of Entries With Given Durations

As you can see, most of my entries are for short durations.

My Hours are more Regular than I thought

While I maintain that I enjoy the privilege of setting my own hours, it turns out my enter and exit times for work are largely determined by traffic and dinner time.

Workday Start and End Times

Time is in 24-hour format

This is the information that will likely change the most as I continue on tracking time, especially when summer comes around and I can bike to work.

Going Forward

I am going to continue tracking my time, but I am going to approach it a little differently to get a better return on investment. Continuing the experiment will keep me honest with myself and keep me using the systems I'm putting in place to get distracted less.

There are a couple things I'm going to change though...

Time-Tracking Logistics

The biggest logistical change I want to make is to stop tracking commute, exercise, and major meals as these don't unintentionally break up my chunks of work as they are planned.

Mixing Up Location

Last year I spent a very productive week working in Maui. What made it productive? No distractions, mainly.

With that previous experience in mind, I'm going to push for more time working out of the office, be that in a different location or at home, I can't really increase my distractions from socializing much more than I have at work so it's worth a try.

There's more to come! I have a few more productivity "hacks" in mind that I'll be writing about once I've ran through the experimentation phase, so stay posted.

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