You can only improve what you measure…(3 min read)

I started out with the thought of getting more out of my time. Ever since this pandemic has started, we are all working from home.

While there are a lot of pros in working from home, it can tend to get to you sometimes. Work time has little boundaries and it tends to spread into your day. You find yourself working all the time. This is why defining your time boundaries and planning your time becomes very important.

I set out on a mission to measure where I spend my time so I can get more done in less time. A secondary goal with measuring time was to also find out where I may be spending that I should not be. Being in the business of technology, I began evaluating tools in the time tracking arena.

Most tools in the time tracking realm seem to attack the problem in the same way. They all give you some sort of web or desktop widget that can enables to you essentially fill out a timesheet. This all seemed very counter-productive to me and within a few attempts I found the task to be cumbersome and non intuitive to how I work. In a few days the entire idea of tracking time was lost and this really wasn’t working out.

The problem can be better solved if I can install a widget that quietly watches what applications I use, what websites I visit and at the end of the day automatically generates a timesheet for me to review and get a clear picture of where I spent my time. I know, I know this opens up the issue with trust. What if the company making such a tool is now taking my data and turns me into the product. Easily solved if I can build it myself and protect my privacy.

I can imagine a million use-cases for such a product – and it can be helpful to a lot of people I know

• I can measure my productivity and know how much time I spent actually working in a day vs being on the phone, conference calls etc
• What time was spent by my technology teams in direct coding product, researching online or in discussions with others
• Accountants can know which time when towards which clients work or project and they can bill even more accurately.
• Lawyers could do the same with their hours and not spend time in tracking their time
• Freelancers could benefit not only in tracking time but using this information to also gain insights in where their estimates were off and how they could be giving better estimates for projects. They could even be using this information to justify & rationalize their estimates.
• Technology companies could do the same – give each member of their company access to this tool so each can measure their time (maintain their privacy) and then report the time they spent on which project. I can already see myself giving this to my team so we can know where we as an organization are spending our time. Seems like an innovative way to be building in measurement with the goal of self-improvement.