After listening more to the Cortex Podcast, I’ve been playing with Toggl, the time tracking website. I’ve been flailing around with it and have given up being able to really gather any data from it this week, but I’d like to get Toggl set up so I enter the weekend with a good system in place. As such, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how I want to track my time.
Deciding whether something is worth tracking is to make a judgement of its value. Making value judgements means designing. But design is done in a bounded space. While your life is technically a limited space, it’s a big sprawling thing to keep track off.
Toggle provides three levels of categorization. So the first thing I did was split Work versus Home.
The second level is called Projects. Work was pretty straightforward, I just split out all the projects. In order to track activities (meetings, emails, etc) I’ll need to start adding tags. Life at home is a little more complicated. Ideally it would be sliced into Good, Chores, and Wasted. But that’s a bit too blunt of an instrument, so right now I have it split up between a few pet projects, eat, sleep, drive, chores, and a generic life in general section.
The third level are the Tasks within each projects. For the last couple days I had been trying to keep a tight eye on this, but I’ve decided to just let it sprawl for a bit and then before reining it in, after I feel like I have a handle on things.
I know my wife is rolling her eyes at this ridiculously nerdy timewasting exercise (especially so soon after my shortcuts exercise), but dude it’s totally gonna be worth it!