Time tracking system

In this article I want to describe my time tracking method.



I'll start with why I need it. It's not a secret to get something, you need to give something. Often (almost always) you have to spend your time. So it took me 4 years ago to know where I spend it, in order to increase the efficiency of its use. Since then, desire has not weakened, but only intensified. And all is well, if not for one thing BUT. Accounting for time in itself takes time, and in addition - requires willful effort. And if volitional efforts give me some pleasure, then I am not ready to spend a lot of time on data processing and statistics calculation. As a human being is reasonable and always strives to simplify and automate everything, as a result of evolutionary changes, my time tracking system today looks like (what would you think?) Of the regular Calendar application on the iPhone, where each activity has its own calendar (work , life, health, etc.) and by creating events of one kind or another, time spent is taken into account. I will say about data analysis and statistics calculation below.



Let me explain the advantages of this approach.

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First, everything is at hand. No need to write data on a piece of paper, then collect and calculate them. No need to keep information in your head, and then transfer it to a computer, especially when it is not accessible for several days.



Here everything is in one place on the phone. Always at hand. Thanks to cloud technologies on all devices at the same time (including in the browser and Outlook on the computer). Data securely stored.



The second is the very convenience of input. No need every fifteen minutes to put tsiferki categories of activities in a notebook and at the end of the week to tamp down statistics. You do not need to specify how long this or that event lasted in the mobile application. Simply enough, holding your finger on the screen in the right place, create an event, if necessary, adjust the time and set the desired category. Moreover, it is easy, convenient and intuitive to do it - stretching or squeezing with your fingers the temporal boundaries of events in the calendar. And that's all.



I also note the possibility of uploading data. This may not be so easy, but it is.



For more informative calendars have different colors, reflecting the nature of the activity. So I have: life, road, everyday routine is light brown, red is development, black is loss, blue is work, green is health, rest.



As a result, the calendar takes the form:







By this type we can already understand in the right, or the wrong direction we are going. In this case, in the wrong.

For more detailed analysis you need more powerful tools. Exact information is required how much time is spent in one category or another for a given period, i.e. tamp statistics This was the main snag of the system until a long time ago. To solve the problem, I had to plug in my programming skills and write a program to compile and analyze data. The result of her work looks like this:







Here the working functionality comes first, not the beauty of forms. Data slices can be any, up to the generalization of categories into groups, but at the moment this one is relevant.

That's the whole system.