Time Management, Part One: Profiling

Sometimes people ask how I have time to work, be with my family, play games, and write blog entries.

The answer is not in *Getting Things Done* (what we really need is a book called *Getting More Done*), but it is one of the oldest tricks from management literature - I first saw it in Drucker in a book he wrote decades ago, and it's been in plenty of other books as well.  I think it's just plain common sense, although I rarely see people do it, and some people have told me it's just plain crazy.

Anyhow, here it is.  Managing time is a lot like optimizing code or tightening a budget. (Or even dieting, if you do it the good old fashioned calorie-counting way.) First you profile;  then you cut or tighten the bottlenecks.

To profile my time, I have a lined paper broken into fifteen-minute blocks, and sometimes I'll update it when I switch tasks, and sometimes I'll update it retroactively with my best guess for how the previous n hours were spent.  Although I used to just profile the work day, lately I've been profiling my whole twenty-four hour days, because doing the startup thing I find myself working on the evenings and weekends, so its valuable data.  I don't profile every day - I only start profiling when I find myself wondering, "Where did my time go?  How come I didn't get anything done this week?"  Don't we all wonder that from time to time?  Well, when I find myself wondering, I start gathering data to get the answer.

I'll usually collect data for about a month or so and then stop.  Sometimes I'll put the data into a spreadsheet and sometimes I'll just eyeball it. 

In my latest round of time-profiling, the biggest chunk of time went to sleep.  Spending time with Cathy and/or Sofi was the next biggest chunk, although much smaller than sleep.  Coding was a big chunk, but not as big as I would have liked - ideally I'd arrange things so I get more time for this.  Reading and writing e-mail was a big chunk.  Actually playing games was a big chunk.  Blogging, interestingly, was barely on the radar - I spend about an hour every week or three writing a blog entry, which strikes me as a worthwhile investment.

Next week (or whenever I get around to it) - once you've profiled, how do you optimize?

Comments

[Chris Busse]

I've found that, like counting calories, when I do this (and I do it like you do, when I find I start don't knowing where my day went), that having to write down "aimlessly wandered internet" for that chunk makes me think twice about aimlessly wandering the internet, and my days get more productive.

[Aaron]

I started profiling my work days a little while ago, mostly to track what overtime I was doing and try and ensure I only work 40 hour weeks.
It seems that just keeping track of what I'm doing causes me to try and do more things in a day. I haven't even considered optimizing that yet, but the idea seems interesting. I'd imagine it's difficult to optimize a lot of tasks, depending on what you're recording notes for. For instance, if I know I worked on three features, one feature took exactly the amount of time estimated, one took three times longer, and the last took 15% longer; well what the heck does that mean as far as optimization goes?

Well, I look forward to the next post! I'm glad to hear you're getting enough sleep!

[Brett Douville]

I once used this sort of "what did I do today" profiling purely defensively. I felt that the project I was on was going dangerously astray, and I wanted to have a good understanding of how that was impacting my own work. I wanted to be able to say, when someone asked me, "Why isn't the such-and-such system done?" that I'd have a good answer -- "Well, I spent 45 minutes tracking down a bug in the blah-de-blah code that was hampering all the designers, and then another 15 coming up with a process solution to email you, which you then shot down." (It was a frustrating project.)

Anyway, the other time I used something like this I was asking people to account for what they were doing during the day -- not so much to keep tabs on them, but to communicate to the rest of the programming team what was going on by emailing them out to everyone every day (we used some Outlook buttons and forms and stuff to make it easy to generate rules etc, to minimize impact). On more than one occasion, we were able to more quickly track down a bug because we knew who had been in what code. We did this in the last six months of the project, when any barrier to shipping was extremely problematic.

So, point is -- there's data here that's worthwhile for more than only optimizing, but as you point out, it's only data you should track when you think things might be going off the rails, or when you want to keep them from going off the rails.

[Simon Cooke]

One reason why most people don't have enough time in their lives?

It's quite simply this:

If you're feeling depressed, down, generally sick, or have any kind of malaise, you won't actually pursue activities with the right kind of zeal.

If you're feeling happy, upbeat, well, and full of energy, you'll get a lot more done.

I know that when I'm feeling down, I don't have time to exercise, do the things I enjoy, or hang out. I just sit at home and watch TV, or surf the net, or any number of other things instead of doing what I want to do.

If I'm feeling good (like right now), I don't have a problem finding the time - I just get that stuff done. And it all becomes much easier.

Weird, but true. It's like there's this odd perspective shift that automatically happens based on how good you feel.

[Jamie Fristrom]

That's a really good point. Or you sit at your computer and could be working but you're actually staring off into space ruminating about wrongs that have been done unto you.

Which raises the question: can you make yourself happy? Prozac, I guess.

[Parveen Kaler]

Part of this can be attributed to what David Allen calls "open loops". If thing are swirling around in your head, life can feel overwhelming. It wears on you.

Capture this open loop and put it into your trusted system.

At home, I'll quickly write it on a sticky note and post it on the wall behind me. At work, I write it in on a sticky and post it on the inside cover of my notebook.

At the end of the day, I go through all of the stickies and figure out what to do about all of the items.

[Ivan-Assen]

Here's a nice tool I found which helps with profiling - it captures a screenshot of your screen at a preset interval. E.g. one picture every 5 seconds makes for a about 3 minute long 20 fps movie to watch at the end of the day to get yourself truly ashamed...

http://www.timesnapper.com/

[Kevin Sparks]

freetimesheet.com is free... but it seemed a bit too confusing. I've tried the demo at http://www.mindsalt.com. Loved it, but the project that required the time tracking/billing fell through... so we stopped looking around for a timesheet system.