Tracking Your Time
I’ve been using a time tracking tool pretty consistently for the last year to categorize all of my time spent at work. It started with wondering how much time I was spending in meetings. Eventually I found that it was easier to keep up with than I thought, so I just stuck with it. Looking back at the year, I can see some interesting data.
Toggl
The primary tool I’ve been using is Toggl. It’s a simple app that sits in you status bar and prompts you to start a timer for what you’re currently working on, if there isn’t one running already.
I eventually settled on five primary “projects” that my time is categorized under: meetings, coding, 1:1s, writing and other. In the end, I did end up spending more time in meetings than doing anything else.
Other/GTD time
Other eventually became just “GTD” time, which is short for getting things done. It’s usually the first block of time in the morning, right after I grab coffee. It consists of processing all my todos and notes from the previous day. Some tasks I just categorize and set a due date for. Other tasks I complete right then, if they are quick. My time spent on this category over the course of the year was pretty constant.
I have a whole separate blog post on GTD, if you want to learn more.
Writing time
The amount of time I spend writing wiki pages, blog posts and longer emails also stayed pretty constant over the year. If I had broken this down into blog time and everything else, I would imagine that blogging is at most two hours a month.
Coding time
Coding is the area that I expected to tail off dramatically, and I was not disappointed. This year I went from managing a team of three and being very hands on coding, to three teams with 12 total people. In the past, I’ve noticed that right when you get to 5 or 6 people, you basically cannot write code anymore.
April was a hackathon project that I spent way to much extra time on. October was a major release that was all hands on deck. I spent a bunch of time doing QA type stuff that I categorized as coding. Other than that, it’s been a very steady trend downwards.
Meetings and 1:1s
Meeting time was somewhat steady. I see a spike in March that was a bunch of interviews, including a potential aquihire. There is another big spike in September, which was getting a new boss, splitting up a team and also a bunch of late project schedule coordination meetings.
For one on ones, there was a steady increase as we added new team members, and then a big spike in August as we added a few new people all at once.
Timebox
Remember that hackathon project? I also wrote a Slack bot to categorize meetings on my actual calendar, which is an interesting way of cross checking my manual tracking. It’s a little hard to parse, because the bot is designed to report on one or two weeks at time. But you can see that while overall meeting time has gone up, I’ve actually been pretty successful at maintaining and even increasing the amount of free time I have in blocks - time to actually work on something substantial without interruptions.
In fact, my time this year was 57% free time with 267 hours in blocks of at least 3 hours. Doesn’t sound too bad when you put it that way!
RescueTime
Finally, there is another fully automated time tracker that I started using more recently called RescueTime. It can give you a breakdown of time spent by app/website. I’m spending more time in Google Spreadsheets than in my terminal app and my code editor combined, which is definitely a strong signal.
