There is some mention of time logs on these forums, but, as I can tell, there was no in-depth discussion of this extremely powerful personal effectiveness tool.
How do you use time logging? Do you use pen and paper, text files, Excel, or special software, like LifeLog?
What impact time logs have on your productivity? Does just keeping a time log makes you more productive, or does the main benefit comes from log analyzing afterwards?
How do you analyze the time log? What feedback it gives you? Do you use categories? Do your categories overlap, more like tags (for example, doing web browsing for work can go both to 'browsing' and 'work' category?
Do you use any tools to chart how much time went to one category or another?
My personal time log keeping experience is relatively short yet. I've started to keep a time log a week ago, and my first impression is that it made me more productive just because I keep a log. That is, keeping a log disciplines me, makes me think 'What are you going to do now?' or 'What are you doing now?' and I have to come up with answer that can be entered into the log, so I can't just 'do nothing', unless I consciously decided to get a break and do nothing for some time.
Right now I'm keeping a log using a .LOG trick in Notepad. If you create a file and put .LOG as the first string, then every time you open this file again, Notepad will automatically start a new line and insert a timestamp with current time. So it looks like this:
Code:
.LOG
10:14 09.06.2007
your entry here
I created a text file named timelog.txt, placed shortcut to it on the desktop, assigned a hot key (Ctrl-Alt-T), so, every time I need to make an entry, I hit Ctrl-Atl-T, enter the text, hit Alt-S to save the log and Alt-F4 to close it till the next time. It is lighting fast, because no mouse involved in the process and you do not need even think what time it is.
At the end of the day I glance over my time log, trying to find some ideas how to improve my schedule and habits, and rename the file to timelog-YYYY-MM-DD.txt. After that, I clean up timelog.txt for the next day.
I now think how to add categories to my time log and how to analyze it more efficiently. It can be better than just reading the log I think.
The problem that I've encountered is that I sometime forget to make an entry. It happens seldom, but it is very distrurbing. I handle it in two ways now - if I don't remember when I switched tasks, I append the description of the new task to the current entry, for example 'reading docs + checking mail', so I at least know that I did two things. If, luckily, I remember the exact time of task switching, I enter the new task manually in timelog.txt.
But my intention is to eliminate forgetting to log a task completely. Can anyone offer an idea how to do it?
I welcome everyone to share experiences and thoughts on time logging in this thread.
Thank you!