Time tracking blog

Attention shoppers – there are only 10 days left until Christmas.  In isle 7, save a bundle on this season’s hottest holiday gift: time.

Say what now?

A show of hands (or comments if you like) – who’s got their holiday shopping done?  I’ve often found that there are two very distinct groups: One that has their holiday shopping done by August (Yes, I’m talking to you mom) and those that wait until just about the last possible moment, and spend Christmas morning getting up just a bit earlier to umm…make the coffee (more along the lines of – oh crap!  Did I forget to wrap Susan’s present)?  I fall into category two.  So this year, I’m trying something a bit different: Using TSheets to optimize my holiday experience.

Around the 20th of November I logged into my TSheets account and started making job codes of people that I had to buy gifts for.  In my case, this amounted to around 15 people.  I then set up a bunch of job codes: Shopping with three subcodes: specialty item shopping, online shopping, and brick and mortar shopping.  Next, onto travel time and finishing up with wrapping time.

The rest is self-explanatory.  I’ve been using the TSheets iPhone mobile time tracking app to track the times that I spend walking to, waiting for, riding, and walking to the shops I need to go (note to self: a mall would help simplify this process).  Then with a simple flip of the job codes, I’ve been tracking the actual time spent looking through the stores to find that perfect cashmere for her, and that book I told him about months ago.  Likewise, back at casa del Dan, I’ve been using the TSheets desktop widget to track time that I’m spending on amazon.com to find, compare, and order various gifts for aforementioned 15 folks.  And now for the real challenge: wrapping.  When it comes to packaging gifts into a nice to look at format held together with scotch tape, I seem to have been born with three thumbs.  As of today, I’ve only wrapped seven out of the thirty or so gifts that I’ve either already got in the house, or on their way (thanks UPS!).

The Breakdown:

While I’m not yet completely done, thus far I’ve managed to rack up:

• Travel – 4 hours 58 minutes
• Shopping – 17 hours 18 minutes
• Wrapping – 1 hour 18 minutes

17 Hours shopping?  Yes, I know…I’m surprised too.  Either I need to seriously rethink my gift selection and purchasing process or hire a personal shopper.  The travel doesn’t really shock me, as noted, I did not go to a ‘get it all under one roof’ shopping complex, but have traveled to a number of individual stores.  Wrapping?  Well, no shock there to be honest.

What does it all mean?

To be honest, this is the first year/holiday season that I’ve experimented with time tracking in relation to personal shopping, and the results have been truly eye opening.  As noted above, 17.2 hours of shopping is really ridiculous.  Next year I’ll be rethinking the process and perhaps spend either a bit more time thinking gifts out before I even head out the door, or spending a lot more time with amazon.

Think you’re a Holiday Power Shopper?  Prove it.  TSheets time tracker is not just for business, but personal productivity.  Holiday shopping is something that we all do, whether we want to or not, so why not make it as efficient and productive as possible?

Related articles

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• ‘Mega Monday’ set to the busiest Christmas online shopping day

Michael Hunger was searching for a way to track his day.  He finds that task tedious and inconvenient.  Some of his suggested time tracking methods came in the form of software:

• Spreadsheets
• Plain text files
• Browser based time tracking
• Outlook/iCal
• Popup applications/widgets asking for the current task (hmmm…has he not yet found TSheets?)

And others in the form of the physical:

• Sticky Notes
• Paper
• Tally sheets
• Notebook
• Diary/filofax

All are ok solutions.  Naturally, we’re a bit preferential to the application/widget genre, but let’s hear the man out.

What Michael stumbled upon in his daily ‘blue hour’ (time he spends reading in a café before work) is a childhood toy that we all know: Lego.  He quickly realized that events in iCal look remarkably like building blocks of time.  The transition from playing with his daughters legos to iCal’s block of time to Lego as time tracker is simply genius.

With a box of 600 legos purchased from Amazon, Michael set out to track his day in a colorful desktop form.  What he found was that there was a wide variety in color, length, and width of the 600 pieces.  By using the ‘one row’ blocks, Michael builds he day (literally) by segmenting 1, 2, 3, and 4 studded pieces to represent 15 minute blocks of time, 15, 30, 45, and 60 minutes.  By stacking these individual blocks of time on top of each other, he builds a project (color) coded map of his time throughout the day.

Using a ‘one row’ piece to represent the day, Michael lays bricks on top of this ‘day ruler’ so that he can see what he did, and where in his day he did it.  Each day of the week is then coded by a rainbow color scheme.  Red, orange, yellow, green, and blue represent Monday – Friday.  At weeks end, he then uses his lego blocks to enter the data in a timesheet software package.

Michael has found that by using the Lego time tracking system, he can even pre-plan days by using temporary bases and allotting time via the same color coded method.  Benefits include (in Michael’s own words):

• it works (for about 4 months now)
• I have something to play with while pondering stuff
• it looks great
• it’s incredibly fast with no overhead
• planning is possible

He is however quick to point on the one disadvantage:

coworkers coming to your place and disassembling your time tracks

He’s recently updated the original post with an announcement of a small java application that will work in conjunction with a webcam or phone so that the time block is automatically entered in the week’s end timesheet.

This is a fine example of independent ingenuity when it comes to personal time tracking.  Certainly this will work while sitting in a closed environment (read…office), but has little practical application in the mobile work.  You might be hard pressed to pull out your Lego block set while sitting in economy on the next flight to Atlanta.  The Lego system can and will only work for personal time tracking, as just with the time clock or paper and pencil sheets, there are almost certainly time fudgers that would take advantage of the system.

As always, TSheets remains your one stop, easy to use, corporate wide time tracking solution. With widgets, gadgets, and iPhone apps, we’ve got more ways to track time than hours in the day!

Now….off to the TLabs to talk to the Time Scientists about the Lego app integration….