Keeping A Time Journal: Introducing TiddlyTimeJournal
Aug 19th, 2008 by Eats Wombats
A time journal in your browser
Subtitle: Old dog, new tricks. (Footnote: Not too old.)
Like many millions of others I recently watched Randy Pausch’s “last lecture” and, later, his real last lecture, given a few weeks later.
Pausch, in case you missed the story on the web, was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who died recently of pancreatic cancer at the young age of 47. His last lecture became a web phenomenon, seen by millions of people. Ostensibly about achieving one’s childhood dreams, it was, more importantly, a secular homily for his three children, for whom it was recorded, on how to live a good life.
Pausch is now one of the Internet’s immortals and he will undoubtedly be a continuing source of inspiration to many. If I was receiving cues that it was time to go offstage soon I can think of many things I’d rather do in private before living as some kind of dying celebrity, but this is not a criticism of Pausch. Each of us is different.
When my father was dying he and I tacitly pretended he had more time than he had, and so I didn’t actually say “goodbye” to him when I saw him for the last time and neither of us acknowledged his impending end in any way.
What are you doing here?!
he said when I showed up unexpectedly from 8,000km away, out of the blue. A few days later I left knowing that I’d never see him alive again. He knew, of course, but he hoped, and it didn’t seem right to deny him that, to expect a man who’d been a stoic all his life to suddenly change.
He’d quoted a line of poetry to my sister, she thought, at one point, very much in passing.
Something about going down to the sea
she emailed, suggesting I should visit soon.
John Masefield
I answered.
Wow
she replied.
I said, and I came.
He’d stopped smoking 20 years earlier, but it was too late, the damage was done. He died of lung cancer at 72. He left no “message in a bottle” and I know that if he’d been asked to say a few words on YouTube for posterity he would have raged, inwardly at least, not so much against the dying of the light, but against such a blasted imposition.
Randy Pausch, however, was willing to give not just a swan song but an encore. He gave a talk at the University of Virginia on time management (Google video; you can follow it with the slides here). He said very little that was new but he was still galvanic and funny, more than one had any right to expect. I enjoyed the histrionics of his revelation of his habit of telling people who called him on the phone that he
had students waiting
even when he hadn’t — because social engineering (exploiting people’s expectations, beliefs and desires to help) is interesting, not because I approve of artful insincerity. Pausch’s revelation that he had, apparently, an industrial quantity of Thank You notes on his desk might have devalued them. On the other hand it revealed an implacable commitment to courtesy and recognition that was anything but insincere. For all his acknowledged self-interest I doubt any were unappreciated.
The greatest takeaway lesson for me was that I have never, ever, recorded how I spend my time by keeping a time journal. I have many excuses, none worth rehearsing. Accordingly, I resolved to fix this.
All I wanted was a simple software application.
I was overwhelmed, not for the first time, by the quantity, and underwhelmed at the quality and irrelevance of the applications found by Google, It was a similar story for the handful of sites that I turn to when looking for an application.
In the end, after a couple of hours of prospecting, I decided to knock something up myself. My reluctance to reinvent a wheel was overcome by frustration. Of course, I didn’t start from scratch. I reverted to the excellent TiddlyWiki (which I used for TiddlyFolio, recently updated btw) and its growing library of plugins.
The result is TiddlyTimeJournal. You’ll need to save it to your PC to be able to save any data to it.
It fits neatly into my collection of tools, which include
- A Palm Treo 650 with a copy of TikTok
- A Vista toolbar stopwatch/timer gadget from online-stopwatch.com
- A copy of MyLifeOrganized, aka MLO
It’s a bit like having an iPod and a phone and a camera, and there are ergonomic parallels too.
I believe it’s never too late to improve one’s personal efficiency and effectiveness, and the older I get the more it matters.
For what it’s worth, the latest issue of Business Week has a series of articles on issues such as work life balance, productivity, creativity and stress management. Each is a distillation of the knowledge and experiences of authors and readers, and the overall quality is excellent. It’s an issue worth looking out for if you are not a subscriber, and a keeper if you are.
I’ll report in a while on the success or failure of my time journal experiment. The great precept is that one’s perceptions are at best delusional. Your brain lies to you. Why is an interesting subject in itself, but not for this post.
Leaving aside the paternal issue (my own died a year and a half ago, with just about everything left unsaid) a time journal is a good idea. At work, I use the simplest of methods: On Monday morning I print the week’s calendar from Outlook. Then, as I finish each task, I simply fill it in, to the nearest 6 minutes. I used to total the tasks each week, but gave it up when I realized I wasn’t actually doing anything with the data. Mind you, this was for a manager who believed that although our work week was ostensibly 37.5 hours, even if one spent 50 hours a week on work, it could never be more than 100% of one’s time.
I do find that this technique captures the larger chunks of time (most of which remain too short) while allowing me the occasional unaccounted for distraction.
I’ll be interested to know what kind of granularity you are going to apply when naming tasks. I have an all purpose “Admin” that applies to clearing my inbox and lots else besides. But I also have tiny tasks that ought to be lumped somehow. Ultimately, I suppose every task would be linked to a project, in GTD speak, but at present they aren’t.
I think that works if you’re disciplined and have a series of discrete tasks and have mastered, as Pausch had, the art of being unavailable. In some jobs that’s difficult. I know you are not a fan of IT managers (I chanced recently upon a talk you gave in Vienna) but really it’s a job from hell at times. It doesn’t matter how deep the interrupt stack is, there’s always room for one more that must be addressed immediately (email system down is the worst I think). I suppose there are other jobs (in hospitals?) where everything can go out the window day afer day, and some people even like the stress. With IT I found it was too often the case that someone else’s bad planning (or worse) was my emergency. And although my own schedule was constantly bombed I never quantified it.
One of the things that made GTD attractive at first: the focus on relaxing about what you’re not doing (instead of feeling guilty about unavoidable “broken agreements”–mainly with oneself). Given the emphasis on capturing commitments I am surprised now at the comparative lack of attention, in GTD circles anyway, to analysing the past … OR, it didn’t resonate with me at the time. I can say now that I expect a kind of Hawthorne effect.
I had to look up Hawthorne effect; knew the effect, had forgotten (or never knew) the name. Thanks for that.
It isn’t all IT managers I hate, and hate is awfully strong, but we needn’t go into that here.
As for bad planning, I did once think of posting “Your bad planning is not my problem” on my door, a replacement for the much more trite “Abandon all hope …” but am glad I never did.
I don’t recall GTD being up or down on the analysis of the past. I do know that looking at the timesheets I kept revealed some things. Like the value of spending a chunk of time first thing in the morning of getting to inbox=empty. A category of responding to an emergency is probably too large a lump to be interesting, but finer granularity could indicate, perhaps the need to address some fundamental kind of emergency.
Update: the latest version of Gnome, due to be included in Ubuntu 8.10, includes a useful looking time tracking tool.
Update2: TiddlyTimeJournal has inspired the creation of an similar but more capable tool: SideMinder. It adds a TO DO list and a reminder function and can run in a FireFox sidebar.
[...] back of the envelope. It will be called TiddlyJournal (see pic) if I release it (see TiddlyFolio, TiddlyTimeJournal for a couple of other useful little tools created using [...]