10 Months at Harvard, Quantified
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10 Months at Harvard, Quantified
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Re: 10 Months at Harvard, Quantified
#2"I must admit to feeling some hesitation before writing this post, as I fear it may come across as self-indulgent. My motivation in writing it was to communicate how useful self quantification can be. It is a lifestyle change that I believe some can benefit from, and one that can reduce the chronic stress from which far too many of us suffer."
It seems more interesting than useful. Lots of analysis, not much benefit. Maybe
"The only hard targets I currently have is to spend >10% of time writing, and >15% of time reading, which I have hit. This was something I struggled with tremendously before, and I only succeeded when I started tracking work type specifically."
is a benefit, but it's fairly representative in that it's something of a goal within the system rather than an external benefit.
Perhaps there's guilt relieved by realising that a tedious week spent organising a mentoring group increased the amount of interaction as a mentor, but what are the benefits beyond that?
Re: 10 Months at Harvard, Quantified
#3This is very neat. I think this kind of time tracking can be very useful, especially for people in professions that are very self-directing, and provides a mix of short-term and long-term projects. I'm a PhD student and I've been playing around with setting up my own systems (http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/16/unobtrusive-time-tracke... and http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/29/time-tracker-one-week-o...).
A bunch of the things he noted resonate with me, like noting the difference between time spent in the office, and time spent actually working (even when you are not procrastinating, there's all kinds of little things taking your time). I've not been as rigorous about setting goals and then sticking to them, but I did set up a "traffic light" system, aiming to hit 4 hours work on my PhD every day ( a typical "long-term" goal which easily gets buried under short-term commitments and things you can "cross off a list").
I also have data that can let me show how long I work on things on average, at what time of the day etc, but I haven't dug into it yet... I see some great posts about quantified self people (like Sacha Chua http://sachachua.com/blog/2013/07/quantified-awesome-adding-...), but either they tend to use totally off-the-shelf programs like RescueTime, or they tend to write their own solutions... I'd love for the QS community to come up with some standards, for example a standard way of storing time-use data, and then some common libraries - I'd like to continue logging my time in whatever way works best for me, but if someone makes a really neat way of visualizing time spent vs length of chunks, I'd love to be able to run that analysis on my data too... R would be one nice place to host that.
Re: 10 Months at Harvard, Quantified
#4I'd like to hear more about how he used Mathematica for this.
Especially since he mentions Dynamic, which is more often used for creating interactive content. Maybe he used it as a listener…
Re: 10 Months at Harvard, Quantified
#5I'd like to hear more about how he used Mathematica for this. Especially since he mentions Dynamic, which is more often used for creating interactive content. Maybe he used it as a listener…
I'm the author of the original post. I use Dynamic in two ways. The more obvious way is just to create interactive visualizations that I can easily manipulate, for example changing the time granularity or the set of projects displayed. The second use is the link with my calendaring program. I use Dynamic to set up a timer that calls a DLL (through .NET/Link) every few minutes to programmatically fetch the day from Outlook. That way my dashboard is constantly up to date without me having to do anything, and so I can just glance at it whenever I want.
Re: 10 Months at Harvard, Quantified
#6"I must admit to feeling some hesitation before writing this post, as I fear it may come across as self-indulgent. My motivation in writing it was to communicate how useful self quantification can be. It is a lifestyle change that I believe some can benefit from, and one that can reduce the chronic stress from which far too many of us suffer." It seems more interesting than useful. Lots of analysis, not much benefit.…
I think it has been useful to me. For one, I'm more motivated to work because if I slack off, I'll be staring at an empty indicator all week long which really upsets me. I suppose it's just a psychological trick that may or may not work for everyone, but it does for me.
The second thing this helps with is project-based tracking. That is super useful, because I had no idea before how much time I'm really dedicating to my different projects. Of course, my initial assumptions have to make sense. I.e. if I decide to spend 25% of my time on a high-risk project and 35% of my time on a more attainable project, those targets have to make sense. But assuming they do, this system helps me match my targets.
I suppose the next step would be to regress those indicators on some external output, like number of papers published, but I think coming up with a sensible metric would be very difficult.
Re: 10 Months at Harvard, Quantified
#7This is very neat. I think this kind of time tracking can be very useful, especially for people in professions that are very self-directing, and provides a mix of short-term and long-term projects. I'm a PhD student and I've been playing around with setting up my own systems ( http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/16/unobtrusive-time-tracke... and http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/29/time-tracker-one-week-o... ). A bunch…
Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing.
I've been working on tracking my time lately via this app [0] to good success. I was just thinking over something like your unobtrusive tracker there and found myself wondering whether the obtrusive ritual of tracking actually helps "stay on task" and remain aware.
I started using in reference to certain goals, but the most immediate return was realizing just how much time I spend in some form of commute.
I completely agree about standards.
0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rk.timemet...
Re: 10 Months at Harvard, Quantified
#8I started doing something similar to help me with my work as a freelancer.
My approach involves scheduled popups with questions that are really quick to answer. Right now I'm only asking myself "are you being productive?".
I just put it on github an hour ago: https://github.com/bbonf/productive It's probably too raw to be helpful to others, but I plan to improve it soon.
Re: 10 Months at Harvard, Quantified
#9Stephen Wolfram has been doing this for a while - the data is really interesting over the larger timescale: http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytic...
Re: 10 Months at Harvard, Quantified
#10This is very neat. I think this kind of time tracking can be very useful, especially for people in professions that are very self-directing, and provides a mix of short-term and long-term projects. I'm a PhD student and I've been playing around with setting up my own systems ( http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/16/unobtrusive-time-tracke... and http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/03/29/time-tracker-one-week-o... ). A bunch…
I agree. Thanks for posting information about your systems! I might give them a try. I found RescueTime to have many small UI issues that frustrated me too much. I had to uninstall it.