Ask HN: How do you log time? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you log time?

4 pointsJ_tt9 comments

Recently I've struggled to find a way to keep track of what I'm working on in the moment, since I'm often handling queries from people walking into my office. So I'm curious how HN handles it.

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Not the question you asked but: Given that the time lost when you are broken off what you are doing, it often becomes a problem of never making progress. e.g. if it takes you 20 minutes to get back to where you were, if you get an interruption every 15 minutes ...

Solution is to one of the following: 1) Close your door until you are ready for all the interruptions. 2) If no door, put up a sign. 3) Ask people to email the issue and you will get back to them 4) I have taken to showing up early, when there is no one to interrupt me. aka 4 AM, interruptions seem to start around 9, which gives me 5 hours of real work.

When I do need to track time I use a spreadsheet. Easy math, easy record.

I abstract time into units. Small breaks shouldn’t convert into a time unit, and if it does, it simply wasn’t a small break.

I don’t track it, my time units are big enough to keep them ball-parked in my head. My tasks are scoped and small enough to have them ball-parked in my head in 2-3 week (or even monthly) chunks.

But, I don’t like time tracking in general so this is how I handle it in a minimal way.

I’m the opposite about task tracking/scoping. I just don’t let time be a major factor in it, mostly just define a deadline and scope around that.

A few years back I used RescueTime[1]. It can track what you're doing and for how long. Since then there are a few competitors doing the same thing.

[1] https://www.rescuetime.com/

Thanks for sharing!

If I am suddenly interrupted, I write down the time on a slip of paper because this is the quickest way. When the interruption is over, I add its duration into my digital time management, which is a Libre Office Calc table or just a txt file.

For billing/invoicing purposes? Google spreadsheet I can create an invoice from. Billable activity tracked in 15-minute increments. I freelance for multiple customers.

I don’t track non-billable time, not sure what purpose that would serve.

I use https://wakatime.com to automatically track the project and task I'm working on. It's a plugin in your IDE, so it can detect your project.

Lots of notes, high level and low level views, sorted by priority with their required delivery dates.

For me shipping on time and knowing what to ship first matters more.

emacs window with a file in markdown mode, list items like

    + 4h: staring up the anus of the internet
    + 15m: writing

and headings separating days. Specific "billable" projects get collected at the top til that gets moved to invoice files. Some things that aren't real work i track as if they were for the hell of it.

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