I’ve always wanted to track how I spend my day working on various projects. More often than not, I’m usually wondering how my day or week just got over while I feel nothing significant was done. One more point to add is that it’s been a while since I built something on my own. Trying to solve both problems at the same time, I build a customized time tracker for myself. The data from the last 2 weeks have been interesting.
- Not so surprised by the fact that Meetings, 1:1, and Hiring takes up most of my time.
- Surprised that my coding time is 10% of total work time. Probably the above data is skewed because of the time I spent building the time tracker
- I wish I could do something about improving the reading time.
- Surprised (and not in a good way) that the work is split equally among all the days. I expected the numbers to go down during the weekends.
- Also surprised that Tuesday’s are light. I usually have most of my 1:1’s is on Tuesdays. Probably the data got skewed because I moved many meetings from Tuesday to Wednesday in the last 2 weeks.
Overall learning from this whole exercise,
- Try to reduce the overall meetings. Hopefully, try to reduce it to 20% from the current 30%.
- Improve the coding/reading time during the weekends.
- Spend a lot more time on the Hexagon project.
- Building/learning something new is always fun. I should do this more often.
It was fun to build something for myself. Being the only developer and the only user gives you a lot of learning opportunities. In this case, I ended up building a small web application using React.js and made it the default app for the Raspberry Pi with a touch screen. Whenever I had any work, I had to tap the right choice during that time. Looking forward to adding more features to this time tracker in the future.
