March 26, 2009 at 14:11Simple timing: a service for controlling time
I have never been a fan of time management and strict daily routines. Probably, like many, I have all been associated with wild tediousness and robot people who live on a schedule, constantly look at their watches and write something down in a diary. I tried a lot of things, was fond of a variety of things, lived in completely different rhythms with a different number of daily tasks. As a result, I realized that in my life I want to achieve too many goals, to develop in several directions at once, often not related to each other. For example, I am interested in: programming, design, business, sports, fiction and philosophy, music, the development of communication skills, respectively, the work itself :) The current level in each of the directions is completely different. Now imagine that time is a resource, and attention is a controller,
How is the process going on for me, and most likely for many of you, especially if you are a freelancer and work from home? During the day, the controller behaves like a roulette wheel, randomly allocating time to one or the other direction. In the morning you start to work, then get distracted and read the Habr, then climbed into some forum and write a post, worked again, then you were distracted by a link to an interesting book and you read again. It’s lunch time, then you try to work, but the exhausted ones still slide down to watch bashorg or talk in ICQ, after an hour or two you pull yourself together and work again. From time to time, you get some ideas, you remember something by abstract interests, find the docks and read them for 15-20 minutes. By the end of the day, you ask yourself the question: what and how much time did I do during the day? It often happens that that you really didn’t do anything. Attention jumped from one task to another, and you did not control this process at all. From here I came to the following conclusions (it should be noted that they are not a discovery of America and, probably, similar ideas appear in time-managerial literature):
1. Strictly prioritize. Perhaps you need to do something already this month / year, and something can be postponed to the next
2. It is necessary to divide the resource into portions or time periods for each of the directions (reading, chatter, project No. 1 ...)
3. In each period of time, strive to deal with only one direction
4. No matter how hard you try, there will still be breakdowns. You need to control how much time each direction takes you to understand how you spend your time. In addition, such control is a great discipline.
If the first three points are strictly individual, then to help the fourth I wrote a simple service: chronoman.ru .
The essence is simple: you create tasks for which you spend time during the day and celebrate when you start doing them, and when you stop, you stop them. It's like a set of stopwatch for each of your projects, cases or useless time-eaters.
As you can see from this picture, I’ve been writing this short post for 46 minutes :)
You can get statistics on the time spent, for any period, as a proportional ratio of the time spent:
Or, taking into account the time not taken into account:
Of course, this scheme is not suitable for everyone. Using such a service is fraught with a number of inconveniences, the main of which is that you need to follow this, constantly mark tasks and stop them when you are done. And many people are most effective in an atmosphere of creative chaos. Therefore, this service does not pretend to be anything, I wrote it more for myself, but I will be glad if it is useful to you too.
How is the process going on for me, and most likely for many of you, especially if you are a freelancer and work from home? During the day, the controller behaves like a roulette wheel, randomly allocating time to one or the other direction. In the morning you start to work, then get distracted and read the Habr, then climbed into some forum and write a post, worked again, then you were distracted by a link to an interesting book and you read again. It’s lunch time, then you try to work, but the exhausted ones still slide down to watch bashorg or talk in ICQ, after an hour or two you pull yourself together and work again. From time to time, you get some ideas, you remember something by abstract interests, find the docks and read them for 15-20 minutes. By the end of the day, you ask yourself the question: what and how much time did I do during the day? It often happens that that you really didn’t do anything. Attention jumped from one task to another, and you did not control this process at all. From here I came to the following conclusions (it should be noted that they are not a discovery of America and, probably, similar ideas appear in time-managerial literature):
1. Strictly prioritize. Perhaps you need to do something already this month / year, and something can be postponed to the next
2. It is necessary to divide the resource into portions or time periods for each of the directions (reading, chatter, project No. 1 ...)
3. In each period of time, strive to deal with only one direction
4. No matter how hard you try, there will still be breakdowns. You need to control how much time each direction takes you to understand how you spend your time. In addition, such control is a great discipline.
If the first three points are strictly individual, then to help the fourth I wrote a simple service: chronoman.ru .
The essence is simple: you create tasks for which you spend time during the day and celebrate when you start doing them, and when you stop, you stop them. It's like a set of stopwatch for each of your projects, cases or useless time-eaters.
As you can see from this picture, I’ve been writing this short post for 46 minutes :)
You can get statistics on the time spent, for any period, as a proportional ratio of the time spent:
Or, taking into account the time not taken into account:
Of course, this scheme is not suitable for everyone. Using such a service is fraught with a number of inconveniences, the main of which is that you need to follow this, constantly mark tasks and stop them when you are done. And many people are most effective in an atmosphere of creative chaos. Therefore, this service does not pretend to be anything, I wrote it more for myself, but I will be glad if it is useful to you too.