Example of time-tracking

[Gwern Branwen]

http://lightonphiri.org/blog/quantified-self-the-three-year-long-time-tracking-experiment

> Between June 2011 and June 2013 I diligently tracked the way that I used my 24-hour cycles. I initiated this painstaking task after going through a long spell of productivity draught; I was obsessed with how exactly I spent my ‘Work -> Eat -> Sleep’ cycles. To achieve this, I used Hamster Time Tracker [1]. I recently decided to dig into this wealth of information and have spent the last couple of days analyzing it. While the data I collected is not 100% accurate, visible patterns emerge.
>
> ...
> - I discovered that I slept an average of 5.1 hours per day (see table below)
> - Day-to-day tasks account for an average of 36.14%, implying that I had 63.86% of productivity time at my disposal
> - I work more and often in the morning (segmenting results into day slots– dawn, wee hours, morning, mid-morning, afternoon, evening–yielded even more interesting results…)
> ...
> - I was able to figure out when I am most productive and was thus able to plan my waking life accordingly
> - I knew where most productivity leaks were coming from (social networking sites for instance) and was able to cut down on those activities when I needed to reclaim time
> - I was able to identify tasks that I could easily perform when I was in ‘Zombie’ mode (e.g. current affairs)
> - Perhaps the most prized outcome was figuring out when I was most productive–I wrote more in the morning, I read more in the morning and did most of my coding late at night

He used Project Hamster http://projecthamster.wordpress.com/about/
which is a manual self-tracking program:

> Whenever you change from doing one task to other, you change your current activity in Hamster. After a while you can see how many hours you have spent on what. Maybe print it out, or export to some suitable format, if time reporting is a request of your employee.

So capable of more semantics than arbtt, but also a lot less
fine-grained and more work.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net