[ale] Minimal tracking of your personal / work at home time

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi all,

I just wanted to give a quick tip for time tracking that you might find helpful.  Many of you work for corporations, and they force you to track your time their way.  Some of you work at home, and may want a way to track your time there, or even track your personal activities.

Now, just to be clear, for myself, I don't want a factory punch card time clock on the wall, or whatever technology is in use now.  I don't need excruciating detail like a lawyer so I can tell each of you in the forum how much time I spent thinking about the message I wrote you.

I just wanted a very basic way to track the time I'm spending on major tasks (like email) each day.  This will help me prioritize and focus more time on certain important tasks, like programming.

I found a neat program in the Google Play store for Android which is free, and it looks like it will do the trick.  It's called HourGlancer Lite.  For my purposes, I just want to track time at a very course level.

It allows you to set up a number of task timers and give them names.  A few of the ones I set up are:

email
programming
pc maintenance
eating and errands
car maintenance

etc.

Each timer appears on the screen and you can shuffle the order of them.

Each timer has a pause / play control,  like a vcr.  Usage is simple.  Just tap the timer for the activity you're engaged in.  Only one timer can be active at once, but all can be off if needed.  So, at the moment, I'm doing email, and I tapped that previously.  That timer starts counting up.  You can then go to other screens on the android device, or even lock it.  The timer keeps running in the background.  When you switch to a different activity, just tap the timer for that.  If you're doing something you don't have a timer for, you can add one, or you can just stop them all.

For example, I'm NOT tracking my TV time.  (The lack of time on other items will be incriminating enough.)

In a few minutes, I'm going to tap the eating and errands timer since I'll be done with email for a while.  When I get back, I'll probably have to tap the finances timer and do some of that.  (Yuck!)

At the end of the day, I just stop all the timers and hit a submit button.  It summarizes the totals and emails me.  Next day, I'm off again and get another chance to divide my time up in a hopefully efficient way.

The app is very simple, but it does what I want.  I thought others might also find it useful.

Sincerely,

Ron



--

Sent from my Android Acer A500 tablet with bluetooth keyboard and K-9 Mail.
Please excuse my potential brevity if I'm typing on the touch screen.

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new email messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier
770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT techstarship.com