Spying on myself

In the last two months I have been trying out a few programs to record my activities at my computer at work. The first one is TimeSnapper - which takes snapshots continuously while I am working. TimeSprite and Qlockwork are applications for recording the active application and document each N seconds. Later the data can be grouped and visualized as a list, charts, calendar activities.

These tools proved invaluable today when I noticed that I have not been filling in my daily report for about a month (oops!). I quickly turned back time (this reminds me about the Time Machine feature in the upcoming new Mac OS) to find out how I was spending these days. In less than 15 minutes may report was done and was actually pretty accurate. Another benefit for me in using such applications is to become more aware of my working habits and to track where my time goes.

I would recommend using a combination of TimeSnapper (see why/how Jon Galloway is using it here) plus one of the two other applications. I am currently using a beta version Qlockwork, which has some rough edges, but its MS Outlook integration is pretty slick and useful. The good thing is that those apps require non of your attention, unless you want to track not just the active documents, but also the current project you are working on (then you have to set it when switching projects).

P.S. Ha, I didn't know there was a movie with the same title as my post.