October 14th 2007
who knew keeping time could be so productive?
Look, it’s just who I am OK?
After wondering what my billables might be if I were keeping track, I decided to, well, keep track.
First, I lucked into finding a pretty handy little time-keeper. It’s a free Mac application called Time Clock[1] (pretty clever name, that!) and it is seriously No Frills. You can’t edit your time, it doesn’t show seconds, but it’s still damn useful. You select “Start Clock” from a handy menu bar, and it starts keeping track of your time. You select “Stop Clock” when you want to stop.
I know, I could get a stopwatch for that. The best part is that it has a “breaks” feature. You tell it how many minutes you want to go between breaks. When you have worked that many minutes, your entire screen is overlayed with yellow, and a big message appears in the middle: “Time to take a break!” If you’re not ready to stop, you just select “Postpone Break” from your menu and it goes away. You can even set how long you want that “snooze” interval to be.
I thought at first that I’d hate the yellow thing–it’s really a vile shade. But it is the BEST thing. Because it gets my attention. You can work under it with no problems; it’s a purely visual thing. But it’s there, staring you in the face the whole time: get up! get some water, go to the bathroom, stretch!
So I used my handy little Time Clock all day today. I “billed” just under 8 hours. I also made homemade chili (not from a mix—we’re talking onions, garlic, spices, stew meat, some beans (though I could have left them out), some tomato puree, some stock, and the crock pot), watched a bit of football, and took the dog on a walk. All in all, not too bad for a Sunday. I didn’t get everything done that I needed to, but I am VERY close. Frankly, I’m not even bothered that I’m not done, because I know how much I worked today. Usually I feel like I dither around too much; today I know that wasn’t the case because, even if I did dither a bit, I did so with discipline.
On deck for tomorrow: a conference call, a bit more of this journal work, some statutory research for two different projects, and hopefully another day of feeling really productive.
