For the last two years, I’ve been working remotely. My team is based (for the most part) in Ames, Iowa. I live in Chicago. My company has an office here, and I have a desk, but I also have the option to work from home.

So far, this arrangement has been going over well. No negative feedback regarding my performance, anyway.

But recently, I’ve had stints where I’ve felt really unfocused and unproductive. Even if nobody at work is upset with me, it’s draining to feel like you aren’t getting anything done. And for me, that creates a positive feedback loop where I’m less driven and passionate.

Time for Time Tracking

I’ve purchased and read 1/4 of The Zen Programmer by Christian Grobmeier. (Note: that’s more of a comment on how bad I am at seeing things through than an indictment on the quality of the book.) In that chunk of the book, Grobmeier argues that time tracking helps be mindful about getting your work done.

We know we’re not going to get 100% utilization, And this is just for yourself; nobody else is checking up on your time sheet.

So what’s the point? Generally, it encourages you to be more intentional about how you use your time.

Toggl

I settled on using Toggle to help me track my time, and I’ve been pleased so far. It’s got a good mobile app, the web interface is nice, and the desktop app has support for a global shortcut, an automatic timeline, a status bar component, and reminder notifications. Pretty solid feature set.

The app seems to be designed for professional services teams, or other business types with billable hours. So I’m able to categorize my actions in “Projects”, which works well with the reports available on the web app.

Week+ in Review

I started this new habit last Tuesday. It’s a little tough to break down 7 days spanning a weekend, so I might be better off waiting until after tomorrow, but I can try to make some summary statements while I’m here.

Total time

My average for tracked time each day came in right around 7 hours. Given that I would’ve claimed to work 8 hours a day including lunch, I’m pretty pleased with that.

Worse at home

People always say “oh I could never work from home. I’d be so bad at that” and I never really related. Sure, I’ll watch videos and browse reddit throughout the day, but I generally thought I stayed on task. The numbers do not bear that out: I’ve tracked significantly less time when I log on from home so far.

Actually a coder

In the first 4 days of this week, I’ve logged 10 hours of writing code! Some percent of that goes to Stack Overflow, reading documentation/source code, and scratching my chin trying to figure out why I hate the code I’ve written. I also felt the need to rewrite the PR I’m working on at least twice. But still - this has been a good week in terms of producing code.

Time sink

Meetings. I spent over 7 hours in meetings in 4 days, and I’m not anybody’s manager. Most of these were generally productive, but it kinda sucks to see meetings in the #2 spot.

10-15 minutes

When I’m not in “focus mode”, I tend to work in 10 to 15 minute batches. I open a code review, and within 15 minutes, I naturally move on to something else. That surprised me, that I work in such consistent chunks.

Shake it off

This isn’t apparent by the data, but anecdotally, I’ve noticed that just by committing to this little exercise, I do focus better. It’s kind of a running joke that you’ll run out of things to read on reddit, close the tab, then immediately open a new tab and mindlessly type in “reddit.com”, right? Turns out I do that kinda thing a lot, except the first tab is a code review.

Especially in the first few days, I caught myself immediately wandering to my “personal” browser profile after opening a code review. I’ve probably been doing that for years without thinking about it. Now, since I’ve started a timer named “Code Review”, my brain kicks back on and gives me the extra willpower to get back on task.

Now, why the act of tracking my time helps me focus is up for discussion. I’m not a cognitive psychologist, though I might like to be, but I do have the advantage of living inside my own head. I think it’s more about not wanting to taint the data I’m collecting than something to do with guilt from slacking off.

Summary

So that’s pretty much my experience with tracking my time in Toggl so far. I hope to continue, and maybe even extend it into more of my personal life. If it becomes second nature during the work day, I could see myself also tracking how much time I spend not doing anything valuable on my couch.

On the other hand, though, after fulfilling my personal commitment to write this blog post, maybe I’ll just let it drop and go back to being a bit of a pile.

Only time will tell… OH MY GOD DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE WHAT A WRAP UP SENTENCE LEVAR BURTON WOULD BE PROUD GET ME A JOB WRITING FOR CBS.