DIY time management system for KPI-based freelancer

What can be measured is manageable. Peter Drucker

Any normal programmer, because of healthy laziness, probably wants to work less and get better results. Therefore, it is not surprising that posts with chips on the topic of time management and self-motivation steadily go to Habré to the top. The trouble is that even following all these tips you won’t understand right away - but how has the efficiency changed and what exactly influenced it? After all, in order to track the change in efficiency, you first need to measure it at first!

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

By the way, all that is needed to use 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 time losses in the absence of control

You, dear reader, are the owners of a small capital - personal time capital. Unfortunately or fortunately, there are no millionaires. If it is optimistic to assume that you still have 50 years of active life, then you own a capital of 440 thousand hours. Excluding sleep time - 290 thousand hours. Moreover, unlike money capital, time capital is non-renewable. You cannot earn more time - you can only more or less effectively dispose of existing ones.

Merciless statistics say: if you work in the office, you get torn off from work on average once every 8 minutes. Thanks to this, only up to two hours a day flows into a hole of small distractions - 12% of your capital. Leaking useless and irrevocable.

Not only are you robbed, robbed in broad daylight, robbed brazenly and shamelessly. How effectively do you manage the few that remain? When you make management decisions such as "allocate so much time to such and such a project", what information do you rely on? Does your personal accounting give you reliable data - how much time did you spend on it, and what kind of return did you get?

Of course, you can manage without reliable information. You drive a car, the windows are stained with paint, the rear-view mirrors are missing as a class. On the basis of naked intuition, you turn the steering wheel, but the wheels do not turn immediately, and not always in the same direction. Sadly, a fact - that is how most professional managers manage their most expensive, extremely limited and absolutely non-renewable capital - their time.

That's about this attitude, and I took up time management. Since it is useless to engage in such things without specific goals, for a start I will briefly outline the initial premises at the time the experiment starts. I do freelance work, I set up my own work schedule and I need to manage it very competently. Standard calendars, to-do lists, etc. - it's all fine, without them anywhere. But they do not solve the problem of a balanced distribution of time. Regularly I came across the same rake. Or I didn’t “load” my schedule with projects if there was an excess of free time and effort and accordingly earned less than I could. Or vice versa, gaining strength, I took on an unnecessarily large load and then the quality of life suffered from this (well, you yourself know how it happens - with sleep, with productivity, with relationships). I'm also irrational I can’t work every day as a regular schedule, and this also does not simplify planning. Therefore, the tasks were as follows:

1) Understand in what mode and how much time I can work with stable productivity day after day. To do this, you need to measure the actual time that I devote to a particular type of activity.

2) Having found out your maximum and optimal indicators, make plans for your own load (for a month / week) based on the optimal numbers.

3) Get not intuitive, but clearly measurable and clearly displayed indicators of the productivity of your work.

Surprisingly, the implementation of only the first paragraph has already turned out to be mega-significant! Thus, I checked for myself the well-known effect that athletes and coaches have long known. If you start to keep a journal and record the results of training there, they will grow faster than without a journal. Awareness is a powerful force. So, to measure the time actually 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 on the phone) and the data from which I can then freely download for example in Excel for my own calculations.

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

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

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 generally not annoying. I poked at the desired icon and do any business. And if I forgot to note the current activity, the program itself can regularly remind about it at given intervals. Naturally, there are no reminders at night, it is also flexibly configured. The Android version also has automation through integration with Tasker . And this is really important, because at first it’s very easy to forget about time control and get stuck in some bullshit 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 patterns and lack of sleep. But did not imagine that SUCH. It is not surprising that with an increase in workload, the body from a certain moment simply began to blunt hard and then simply “turned off”. Therefore, I quickly got myself daily, weekly and monthly sleep goals in the "be sure to achieve these indicators for the period." And when planning, he looked how far I lagged behind them, or vice versa, how far I overtook them. Based on the results of the whole experiment, I can say that this turned out to be the most important indicator :)

Displaying progress in achieving goals can look like this (example from the official website):



And here is a report on achieving a goal for a dream for one of the weeks:



2) The reverse side of the coin: when it seemed to me that I worked a little, I worked a lot. And when it seemed to me that I was working fine - I worked VERY MUCH. When I saw the numbers, I began to set goals for projects of a different type: DO NOT exceed the planned monthly work limit. Thus, you don’t have to steal time from sleep, and learn to more accurately evaluate the complexity and profitability of various projects (in terms of the hour of working time). Both that and that is certainly useful.

3) It was also surprising to discover that I still have a substantial supply of free time, which I can still spend on something useful, or nonsense. What is great, unrecorded time is clearly shown in the program. Then I decided not to deceive myself and, as far as possible, honestly record the time spent on entertainment. As a result, it turned out another unexpected and funny thing. No matter how I organize the work, the body directly requires a certain number of hours for all sorts of hobby-entertainments as well as for sleep. There is a minute, there are two, somewhere else ten ... In general, the body will take its own and I decided that to fight this is useless and even harmful. Well, in fact - it’s better to work to live, and not vice versa. Therefore, I began to pre-plan time for rest. And he began to relax better, with a clear conscience. And I got less distracted from work,

This may look like a report that shows unrecorded time:



4) Time for various kinds of negotiations was also greatly underestimated. Oh, in vain I did not count this watch for pure working hours. Still, you need to take them into account when planning and budgeting, or significantly reduce.

As a result, I came to the fact that I drew a small tablet in Excel and began to plan the loading of my week based on the total number of hours that I can spend on a particular type of activity or project. Naturally, he 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 something like this.



Now it is easier for me to balance the work schedule at the level of days of the week and week, and not at the level of individual tasks. In the end, it doesn’t really matter how many minutes I spend on each of the ten tasks of the project, if it is done as it should and on time. General indicators are more important. Naturally, you can draw graphs of the relationship between 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, the cherry on the cake - it is possible to load data into Excel directly from aTimeLogger servers for analysis, through the REST API and the add-in for Excel Power Query (unfortunately, only under Windows). Thus, you can make yourself a "dashboard" (dasboard) and display on it a calculation for all performance indicators. For me, they mainly reflect the ratio between the planned indicators and the actually achieved. And for me this is one of the most fascinating moments. Because to set myself up to work with the approach “but I’ll work now so that I’ll reach this indicator and fly ahead of my schedule” it turns out much easier for me than arguing “well, I did a little work, I had a lot of rest, I still need to work ". Plus, which is very important - the visual display of progress, again, strongly influences my motivation. In general, as in the best MMORP:

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

Instead of a conclusion (since everything is just beginning): to study yourself in this way was very interesting and productive. Unfortunately, intuition in management often fails us, as let me down more than once before implementing this system. Fortunately, IT also offers interesting opportunities for improvement in this regard. I hope this article helps someone make their own interesting time management system and enjoy its benefits. In the end, it’s not so difficult. I wish you all good luck and success! And remember:

What can be measured is manageable. Peter Drucker