I often hear rationalists seeking out things like this, but I’ve yet to hear any of them outright assert or even imply that this is a useful thing to do. I myself have thought about such things before, and my answer has been that I switch tabs and contexts too rapidly to accurately measure these things. In order to get anywhere near effective measurements, I’d need interfaces magnitude orders more pluggable than existing software implementations allow. (Firefox, for example does not value programmability or pluggability, but rather extensibility.) Despite the usefulness of such projects, they will take considerable effort, and I’ve simply not been able to motivate myself to bother simply for the sake of tracking time spent. I won’t argue it doesn’t have any benefits, even known benefits, but I have yet to see any kind of evidence that it is legitimately useful. Perhaps the evidence is not found in the places I’ve expected it to be thus far.
If anyone can justify the benefits or give me tangible evidence of any such thing, I would appreciate it.
I track my time using RescueTime. The value to me is improving my calibration with respect to how well I feel I’m working, as compared to my actual RescueTime hours. Sometimes I think “Wow, I really worked a lot today” when in fact I didn’t get many hours in, and I’d rather have my intuition match the metrics. I don’t have a special justification/goal beyond that but I’m hoping something useful pops out.
I suspect that this is an instance of low cost, low median outcomes, but with high upside—it’s unlikely you’ll find something that makes a difference, but the cost isn’t very high, and there’s always a chance that, without putting numbers on it, you are missing some productivity intervention which would make a big difference to you. For example, perhaps you think poorly when you’re sleep deprived, but you don’t know it, but tracking productivity would let you know that’s happening.
At the NY Quantified Self meetup a few weeks ago, somebody reported tracking her post-concussion symptoms and discovered that, in fact, she wasn’t suffering from a concussion at all—it was a very different condition which required separate treatment.
Ah, I see. That clarifies things significantly. It also further indicates my erratic context switching is non-ordinary and requires special needs on this front.
I have basically this problem (I’m fairly sure it’s tied into my ADHD). As noted below, RescueTime is an excellent solution: it’ll keep track of different tabs in the same program separately, do it automatically, and do it down to the second—so you get a very accurate result at the end. I’ve found some very valuable results from this—for starters, that I work only about 50% of my “work hours” even on a good day, and that I spend much more time on random surfing than I thought I did.
As a baseline, I need a program that will give me more information than simply being slightly more aware of my actions does. I want something that will give me surprising information I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. This is necessarily non-trivial, especially given my knack for metacognition.
By definition, I can’t really guarantee that information it gives you will be surprising. I can tell you that I consider myself a fairly luminous person and that RescueTime still managed to surprise me.
At any rate: I also don’t think you’re going to get better than RescueTime. It keeps track of everything, does it down to the second, and does it without you having to notice—and it certainly helped me, so there’s one data point.
If we track “hours worked” only, that metric might be of little use toward productivity. The first thing that comes to mind is to track hours worked against goals accomplished / milestones met, evaluate how effectively we use our time to achieve various things, and then work on improving inefficiency.
If we track “hours worked” only, that metric might be of little use toward productivity.
Depends on the given person’s level. Where I am now, the main problem is completely avoiding the work, instead wasting all my time online. If I succeed to put at least 1 hour of work towards my goals every day, then I am ready for the next lesson, which is making this hour more efficient.
Meta: Perhaps we could start by describing various levels of goal-reaching-inefficiency, creating a self-diagnostic questionnaire, and then give specific advice for each level. Something like: Level 0 = you are not even able to log whether you work or not. Advice: unknown. Level 1 = you are not working. Advice: use Pomodoro. Level 2 = you are working only on low-priority stuff. Advice: prioritize. Level 3 = you are working on short-term high-priority stuff, but you don’t have a strategy for increasing your skills. Advice: set apart some time for long-term improvement. Etc.
I often hear rationalists seeking out things like this, but I’ve yet to hear any of them outright assert or even imply that this is a useful thing to do. I myself have thought about such things before, and my answer has been that I switch tabs and contexts too rapidly to accurately measure these things. In order to get anywhere near effective measurements, I’d need interfaces magnitude orders more pluggable than existing software implementations allow. (Firefox, for example does not value programmability or pluggability, but rather extensibility.) Despite the usefulness of such projects, they will take considerable effort, and I’ve simply not been able to motivate myself to bother simply for the sake of tracking time spent. I won’t argue it doesn’t have any benefits, even known benefits, but I have yet to see any kind of evidence that it is legitimately useful. Perhaps the evidence is not found in the places I’ve expected it to be thus far.
If anyone can justify the benefits or give me tangible evidence of any such thing, I would appreciate it.
I track my time using RescueTime. The value to me is improving my calibration with respect to how well I feel I’m working, as compared to my actual RescueTime hours. Sometimes I think “Wow, I really worked a lot today” when in fact I didn’t get many hours in, and I’d rather have my intuition match the metrics. I don’t have a special justification/goal beyond that but I’m hoping something useful pops out.
I suspect that this is an instance of low cost, low median outcomes, but with high upside—it’s unlikely you’ll find something that makes a difference, but the cost isn’t very high, and there’s always a chance that, without putting numbers on it, you are missing some productivity intervention which would make a big difference to you. For example, perhaps you think poorly when you’re sleep deprived, but you don’t know it, but tracking productivity would let you know that’s happening.
At the NY Quantified Self meetup a few weeks ago, somebody reported tracking her post-concussion symptoms and discovered that, in fact, she wasn’t suffering from a concussion at all—it was a very different condition which required separate treatment.
Ah, I see. That clarifies things significantly. It also further indicates my erratic context switching is non-ordinary and requires special needs on this front.
I have basically this problem (I’m fairly sure it’s tied into my ADHD). As noted below, RescueTime is an excellent solution: it’ll keep track of different tabs in the same program separately, do it automatically, and do it down to the second—so you get a very accurate result at the end. I’ve found some very valuable results from this—for starters, that I work only about 50% of my “work hours” even on a good day, and that I spend much more time on random surfing than I thought I did.
As a baseline, I need a program that will give me more information than simply being slightly more aware of my actions does. I want something that will give me surprising information I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. This is necessarily non-trivial, especially given my knack for metacognition.
By definition, I can’t really guarantee that information it gives you will be surprising. I can tell you that I consider myself a fairly luminous person and that RescueTime still managed to surprise me.
At any rate: I also don’t think you’re going to get better than RescueTime. It keeps track of everything, does it down to the second, and does it without you having to notice—and it certainly helped me, so there’s one data point.
I see. I’ll have to look into it some time.
If we track “hours worked” only, that metric might be of little use toward productivity. The first thing that comes to mind is to track hours worked against goals accomplished / milestones met, evaluate how effectively we use our time to achieve various things, and then work on improving inefficiency.
Depends on the given person’s level. Where I am now, the main problem is completely avoiding the work, instead wasting all my time online. If I succeed to put at least 1 hour of work towards my goals every day, then I am ready for the next lesson, which is making this hour more efficient.
Meta: Perhaps we could start by describing various levels of goal-reaching-inefficiency, creating a self-diagnostic questionnaire, and then give specific advice for each level. Something like:
Level 0 = you are not even able to log whether you work or not. Advice: unknown.
Level 1 = you are not working. Advice: use Pomodoro.
Level 2 = you are working only on low-priority stuff. Advice: prioritize.
Level 3 = you are working on short-term high-priority stuff, but you don’t have a strategy for increasing your skills. Advice: set apart some time for long-term improvement. Etc.
I see. So it works as an estimation in determining which things to prioritize effort into optimizing.