DIY time management system for freelancer based on KPI

What can be measured is manageable. Peter Drucker



Any normal programmer, for reasons of healthy laziness, probably wants to work less and at the same time get better results. Therefore, it is not surprising that posts with chips on time management and self-motivation consistently go to the top in Habré. The trouble is that even following all these tips you will not understand right away - but how did the efficiency change and what exactly did it affect? After all, in order to track the change in efficiency, you must at least measure it first!

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Under the cut - the history and results of my 4-month experiment to build your own system of productive work based on key performance indicators (Key Performace Indicatiors, KPI). In short, such an approach can turn intensive work into a kind of fun RPG, where the prize for achieving certain indicators and character “pumping” will be real money at the same time as the growing quality of life.



By the way, all that is required for the application of this "tricky" system is a mobile phone and Excel.



Go!



First I want to quote a good article by the Russian time management guru Gleb Arkhangelsky, who believes that time control is absolutely necessary.

The extent of the loss of time in the absence of control



You, dear reader, are the owner of a small capital - capital of personal time. Unfortunately or fortunately, there are no millionaires here. If you optimistically assume that you still have 50 years of active life, then you own a capital of 440 thousand hours. Less time to sleep - 290 thousand hours. At the same time, unlike money capital, time capital is non-renewable. You can not earn more time - you can only more or less effectively dispose of already existing.



Ruthless statistics says: if you work in an office, you are cut off from work on average every 8 minutes. Due to this, only a hole of minor distractions leaks up to two hours a day - 12% of your capital. Flowing out is useless and irrevocable.



Not only are you robbed, robbed in broad daylight, robbed arrogantly and shamelessly. How effectively do you manage the few that remain? When you make management decisions like “set aside so much time on such a project,” what information do you rely on? Does your personal accounting give you reliable data - how much time did you spend on, and what did you get in return?



Of course, you can manage without reliable information. You drive a car, the glass is stained with paint, there are no rear-view mirrors as a class. On the basis of bare intuition, you twist the steering wheel, but the wheels do not turn immediately, and not always in the same direction. Sadly, the fact is that this is how most professional managers manage their most expensive, extremely limited and completely non-renewable capital - their time.

That's about this attitude, and I took up time management. Since it is useless to do such things without specific goals, for a start, let us briefly outline the initial prerequisites for the start of the experiment. I work in freelancing, I create my own work schedule and I need to manage it very well. Standard calendars, to-do lists, etc. - it's all beautiful, without them nowhere. But they do not solve the problem of a balanced distribution of time. Regularly I ran across the same rake. Either I “did not upload” my schedule with projects in the presence of an excess of free time and energy and, accordingly, I earned less than I could. Or vice versa, having gained strength, I took upon myself an unnecessarily large load and then the quality of life suffered from this (well, you know how it happens - with sleep, with productivity, with relationships). Besides, I am irrational, I can’t work every day as I’ve got on a fixed, fixed schedule, and this also doesn’t simplify planning. Therefore, the tasks were set as follows:



1) Understand in what mode and how much time I can work with stable productivity day after day. For this, it is necessary to measure the actual time that I devote to one or another type of activity.



2) Having learned your maximum and optimal indicators, make plans for your own load (for a month / week) on the basis of optimal numbers.



3) Get not intuitive, but clearly measurable and clearly displayed performance indicators of their work.



Surprisingly, the implementation of only the first paragraph has already proved mega-significant! Thus, I checked on myself a known effect that athletes and coaches have known for a long time. If you start keeping a journal and record the results of training there, they will grow faster than without a journal. Awareness is a mighty force. So, to measure the actual time spent, I needed to find some convenient timer. More precisely, a smart activity tracker. Which will always be at hand (in the form of an application in the phone) and the data from which I can then freely download, for example, to Excel for my own calculations.



I reviewed similar programs for almost two dozen, until I found the one I almost fell in love with. While I was considering all the predicting options, I thought that I would have to do my own program. Fortunately, I didn’t have to - I found one that answered my ideal ideas! And it was written by our compatriot, Sergey Zaplitny.



aTimeLogger runs on iOS / Android, allows you to set goals and monitor their achievement, displays various beautiful graphics, synchronizes data through the cloud, makes uploads to CSV / HTML and allows you to work with data through the REST API. Just a fairy tale! :) And in the process of preparing this article, Sergey responded to my request for revision of the REST API and made a number of improvements there, for which I am very grateful.



The first month I just got used to using the program, set it up for myself and collected the initial data in the "as is" mode. Very comfortable, and not at all annoying. He poked into the desired icon and do any work. And if you note the current activity forgotten - the program itself can regularly remind about it at specified intervals. Naturally, there are no reminders at night, it is also flexibly configured. The Android version also has automation using Tasker integration . And this is really important, because at first it is very easy to forget about the control of time and stick to some kind of nonsense activity for a long time.



As a result, after 3 weeks of its relaxed use, I made several conclusions:



1) I knew that I had problems with sleep and sleep. But did not imagine that such. It is not surprising that with the growth of work load, the body from a certain moment simply began to bluntly hard and then simply “shut down”. Therefore, I quickly got myself daily, weekly, and monthly goals for sleeping in the “be sure to achieve these indicators over a period.” And when planning, I looked at how far I was lagging behind them, or vice versa, as far as I overtake them. According to the results of the whole experiment, I can say that this turned out to be the most important indicator :)



Displaying progress in achieving goals may look like this (example from the official site):







And here is a report on the achievement of the goal of sleep for one of the weeks:







2) The downside: when it seemed to me that I worked a little, I worked a lot. And when it seemed to me that I was working normally - I worked MUCH. After seeing the numbers, I began to set goals for projects of another type: DO NOT exceed the planned monthly work limit. Thus, you will not have to steal time from sleep, and learn to more accurately assess the laboriousness and profitability of various projects (in terms of hour of working time). Both this and that is definitely useful.



3) I was also surprised to find out that I still have a substantial supply of free time, which I can still spend either on something useful or on nonsense. What is great, the unrecorded time is clearly shown in the program. Then I decided not to deceive myself and, if possible, honestly record the time spent on entertainment. As a result, it turned out another unexpected and funny thing. No matter how I organized the work, the body really requires a certain number of hours for all sorts of hobby-entertainment as well as for sleeping. There is a minute, there are two, somewhere else ten ... In general, my body will take and I decided that it is useless and even harmful to deal with it. Well, in fact - it is better to work to live, and not vice versa. Therefore, I began to plan time for rest in advance. And he began to rest better, with a clear conscience. And I became less distracted from work, and it was easier to start it.



Here is a report that shows unrecorded time:







4) The time for various kinds of negotiations was also greatly underestimated. Oh, in vain, I did not consider these hours for net working hours. Still, you need to take them into account when planning and budgeting, or significantly reduce.



As a result, I came to the conclusion that I wrote a small table in Excel and began to plan the loading of my week based on the total number of hours I can spend on a particular type of activity or project. Naturally, I made 2 tablets: for rest and for work. Well, the remaining time can be filled with anything to your taste, I love the freedom of choice :) It looks like this.







Now it’s easier for me to balance my work schedule at the level of days of the week and week, and not at the level of individual tasks. In the end, it is not very important how many minutes I will spend on each of the ten tasks on the project, if it is done properly and on time. General indicators are more important. Naturally, you can draw graphs of the ratio of work and rest, and indeed what the soul deigns. Excel is also a very powerful program :)



For example, you can control the sleep schedule:







Or the balance of work, rest and free time:







Well, a cherry on a cake - it is possible to upload data to Excel directly from aTimeLogger servers for analysis, through the REST API and add-in for Excel Power Query (unfortunately, only under Windows). Thus, you can make yourself a dashboard (dasboard) and put on it a calculation for all performance indicators. In my opinion, they mainly reflect the ratio between the planned indicators and the actually achieved ones. And for me this is one of the most exciting moments. Since I can adjust myself to work with the approach “but now I’ll work so hard that I’ll reach this indicator and overtake my schedule” I’m getting much easier than arguing “well, I’ve done something weakly, I had a lot of rest, ". Plus, which is very important - a visual display of progress, again, I have a strong influence on motivation. In general, as in the best MMORP: visual progress bars and detailed statistics pumping character rule.



For fans of web programming, the basic description of the REST API is already ready. By the way, to view a variety of graphs without any programming, a new version of aTimeLogger is being prepared for release with the web application timetrack.io .



Instead of a conclusion (since everything is just beginning): to study oneself in this way turned out to be very interesting and productive. Unfortunately, intuition in management often fails us, as it has failed me more than once before implementing this system. Fortunately, IT also offers interesting opportunities for improvement. I hope that this article will help someone to make their own interesting time management system and enjoy its fruits. In the end, not so difficult. I wish you all good luck and success! And remember:



What can be measured is manageable. Peter Drucker