Tracking My Work Time
Gather round and listen to a story of me, self-surveillance, entrepreneurship, and a miniconference about the Python programming language.
I have always charged a flat rate for art and design.* This time, I wanted to time myself to find out what I earned per hour and adjust my future rates to what I need to bring in, based on accurate estimates of different types of assignments.
I knew from experience that a stopwatch system such as Harvest doesn't work for me.**
I looked for a piece of software which would log each time I brought a window into focus for at least a minute, and would discount the times that I activated the screen saver from idleness, and would measure the elapsed time I spent in each document. I assumed software for freelancers to surveil themselves would be a widely-solved market. Although there were many pieces of software out there, each had some crucial unsuitability, like requiring Outlook, or expecting me to deploy it to a huge company, or a rinky-dink incomprehensible interface with documentation by non-English speakers.
Chrometa stands alone in automated time-tracking as the serious product whose team clearly knows what they're doing. The Chrometa support staff tell me the next version is going to do everything I need it to do. Right now it will keep a time log, but the only documents which I can track as belonging to a particular project or client are webpages and Microsoft Office docs. It's intended for lawyers.
The saving grace of the current version is that it outputs a spreadsheet of all the timestamp events I need, and another one containing the elapsed durations of work on documents. All documents, not just Microsoft Office.***
Enter PyOhio, a regional miniconference in Columbus about the Python programming language. I spent much of the weekend at the conference with my drawing tablet and laptop, working on illustrations. Some attendees saw this and asked me for my rates and my card. I told them about my time-tracking challenge, and my hope that I could fix it by applying Python scripts to filter irrelevant lines from the Chrometa spreadsheet, categorize the lines into projects, and tally up the time I spent. Everybody reading this who has been to Penguicon or another open-source conference knows what happened next. They were happy to teach me file input/output, and the time tools built into Python.
So I got my filter script working during the car ride back from Ohio today.
* It's almost like, "We agreed on the amount that this outcome is worth to you. Here is the outcome. That will be money dollars, please." I tried to propose contracting to one company a few years ago, where they just wanted me to make a newsletter. I didn't fit with the office culture and didn't want to spend time in it. They weren't even in the twentieth century around there. They were very Upstairs-Downstairs: "Oh, Jeeves! I have rung my bell. Go and fetch the aristocrats their afternoon tea." They couldn't cope with purchasing an outcome from me. They had to purchase me as a human being. Or else how would they dock my pay for making a personal phone call or getting a drink of water?
** Best case: I was productive, but I didn't remember to turn the timer on and off. Medium case: I get into the attention span of a hummingbird and break off the stopwatch knob, metaphorically speaking. Worst case: the reason I was able to remember the timer was that I couldn't attain single-minded focus in the Zone. At any rate, time-tracking is a ton of busy-work that could be easily done by computer, and I hate doing tasks that can be automated. I have sort of quit more than one remote work job over it, if you call "I keep doing the work, but can't bring myself to spend a half-hour a day itemizing each task and guessing how long it took, and I don't touch the time reporting paperwork for several weeks, never getting paid again, until I and the employer just stop talking" a form of "quitting".
*** I swear, line 47 was research. The surrounding activities and timestamps back up this claim. Otherwise why would I have looked at that picture for only one minute? In between two lengthy sessions of painting the "Storm-From-The-X-Men-Is-A-Beautiful-Woman.TIFF" illustration.
Comments
Anonymous on Jul. 28, 2009 1:29 PM — TimeSnapper
I've never used it, but I read the blog of one of the developers of TimeSnapper. It's Windows only, but it sounds like it might do what you want:
http://timesnapper.com/
brettowens on Jul. 28, 2009 4:57 PM — Chrometa
Thanks Matt - we're doing final testing on the next release now, and are looking forward to getting it in your hands soon.
Anonymous on Aug. 10, 2009 2:43 PM — Your Avatar
Matt, are you a Second Life resident?
matt-arnold on Aug. 10, 2009 3:17 PM — Re: Your Avatar
I have been. Who are you?
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