One of the things that we are constantly working on here is better time management. I work on a number of different projects every day and I like having the option to multitask and split up my day between several different interest groups. While it is fun and it keeps me busy, it can be a pain when trying to track time and account for what I did all day long. In the past I've tried keeping Word or Notepad++ open all day, writing in the tasks as well as when I start on them. I've also tried to update my time sheet in real-time, filling the bits in 15 minute increments. Both of these methods failed miserably, not because they are bad ideas, but rather the swift nature of my changes in focus mean that I might only spend 2-4 minutes on any one given task at a time. When installing operating systems or software packages, or working on system maintenance and IT tasks, I normally will have 4-5 RDP sessions open. With all of those open, it's a quick flip to sort through all of them and then find the one that's complete and click "next" or reboot.
Because my focus changes so much, I've started looking at tools that will allow me to keep pretty accurate track of all the things I'm working on. Even when I've found something, I generally lose interest in it, especially if it isn't cross-platform.
Eariler today, I came across a tool that looks like it might be a good fit for me. This is my first day using it (first hour, actully), so it is mostly hope at this point (:
Right now, I've only popped a few items in it, but one of the things I liked about it was that it works both on the Windows Vista Sidebar and iGoogle. This means that even if it doesn't sync across versions, I can still use the same interface from any number of machines. I think I might look and see if I can actually code some improvements into it. I'm not an expert hacker but I would like to see:
- Categories or Parents (For example, under "IT Schtuff", I would like to have one item called "Patch Management" where when I punch in, it ticks the IT clock as well)
- List synchronization (I don't know how it works yet, but I would like to be able to keep the list synchronized through a website [read: SHAREPOINT] or txt/xml file that I can export across machines)
- A little bit of UI clean up (when I first started using it, I thought that the green "IN" button meant that I was in that task and tracking time)
If anyone else out there has any tools that they use to track time like I need, I welcome the feedback!
P.S. In the writing of this blog, I switched to three tasks (blogging, logging in to the Exchange server to change the name on an Equipment Mailbox, and replied to a project e-mail) and punched in for each of them!