Cue Rockwell
Aug. 23rd, 2006 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kickahaAnyone who knows me knows that I'm usually doing a dozen things, frantically. I hate it. I come from a family of chronic procrastinators, and despite my best efforts, I can't seem to shake the malady. The more I try to focus on one thing at a time, the more I find other tasks backing up. Techniques such as the quite awesome GTD have helped, but in the end, I'm still bouncing between umpteen distractions (like, say, LJ?)
So, like any good engineer, I decided that I had to first measure what I wanted to change. I tried keeping a paper log of what I was doing, but it is too easy to 'miss' little things like... oh... checking LJ for 60 seconds, or reading a slashdot article that is just *too cool* for 'just a minute'... which leads to 15 minutes of googling for related articles.
So, like any good technophile, I decided to let the computer do the dirty work.
I researched a few time tracking programs, but they all seem to want to be part of a larger invoice/billing procedure - fine for billable hours folks, not right for me. I found a couple that let you manually change over the project you're working on, but that falls into the same trap as above "Oh, I won't change it for just a *quick peek* at slashdot..." I found one that tracks the current active window, which is cool, but how can it tell if that browser window is LJ or work related?
Solution - use both. I run two apps - one that I manually change between projects, and one that tracks my app/window use. The manual one is for blocking out what task I'm working on, and the automatic one is to keep me honest.
So far, it's working pretty well.
So, like any good engineer, I decided that I had to first measure what I wanted to change. I tried keeping a paper log of what I was doing, but it is too easy to 'miss' little things like... oh... checking LJ for 60 seconds, or reading a slashdot article that is just *too cool* for 'just a minute'... which leads to 15 minutes of googling for related articles.
So, like any good technophile, I decided to let the computer do the dirty work.
I researched a few time tracking programs, but they all seem to want to be part of a larger invoice/billing procedure - fine for billable hours folks, not right for me. I found a couple that let you manually change over the project you're working on, but that falls into the same trap as above "Oh, I won't change it for just a *quick peek* at slashdot..." I found one that tracks the current active window, which is cool, but how can it tell if that browser window is LJ or work related?
Solution - use both. I run two apps - one that I manually change between projects, and one that tracks my app/window use. The manual one is for blocking out what task I'm working on, and the automatic one is to keep me honest.
So far, it's working pretty well.