The Foursquare Blog

So much for that!

Let's deal with it one step at a time. They say what gets tracked gets measured, what is measured gets managed, and what is managed gets done.

Enter TimeWarrior. This is a simple command line tool that helps me track what I spend time on. It then presents reports back to me such as daily lists, and weekly and monthly graphs. Each time block can be tagged with one or more simple words.

For example, here's how I may record a day's major events:

tw start sleep

# morning arrives, breakfast
tw start 8:30 food
tw start 9:00 exercise
tw start 9:30 blog
tw start 10:30 work
tw stop 13:30
tw start 14:00 food
tw stop 14:30
tw start 15:00 work
tw start 20:00 food
tw stop 20:45
tw start 22:30 project
tw stop 23:45

tw start 0:30 sleep

That would be a productive day. All tags represent a major event, and a major event is one worth tracking and one worth doing. Anything not worth doing is not tracked, leaving the report with gaps in the day showing "wasted" or rest time. In this example, only 3.5 hours were spent on untracked/wasted time.

I started using timewarrior in order to track my sleep, to see if I could detect any particular patterns that would be useful to know. But by tracking major events, I can also track my focus. I can detect days when focus is bad, other days when focus is good, and perhaps find the patterns or the reasons for one or the other.

What are the reasons for wasting time? Perhaps that is tomorrow's blog. :-)