The Idea Behind TimeSprite

Like many people, I do a lot of reading on the Internet - blogs, newspapers, discussion groups etc. I learn a lot from these online sources, but there needs to be a balance between learning and actual constructive work. I started wondering how much time I actually spend on different activities, and thinking about an application to track my time on the computer.

Recording the title of the active window turned out to be relatively easy. The difficult part was to organize the information in a useful way. Surfing the Internet in particular produces a huge number of different window titles - typically a different one for every page. Simply listing a time for each page is not very useful - you end up with a huge list of titles with very short times. Likewise, grouping everything together under “Mozilla Firefox” or “Internet Explorer” is not very useful - you need some grouping by different web sites, so you can see work related versus non work related times.

The solution was a moderately complex process which searches for common information in the window titles, and uses the information to create groups of titles. The process can’t be perfect - the title you see in the web browser window comes from the web site itself, so the process relies on web site creators to have a common component in their page titles. However it does work quite well in practice.

You still end up with a lot of groups, and sometimes windows aren’t grouped the way you want, so I added a manual grouping feature. This allows you to combine multiple groups into one, and to assign particular titles to a manual group - effectively overriding the automatic grouping for those titles.

Finally, the ability to specify an activity instead of tracking the active window seemed useful. It allows you to track meetings and other time away from your computer, and some people simply prefer to manually pick an activity rather than track the active window.

Results

Having used the program myself for a while I have been quite pleased with the results. I can see how much time I have spent on the computer, and how much time I spend on productive versus unproductive activities. It still requires discipline to resist distractions, but seeing actual records of the time at the end of the day is a powerful motivator. I am actually a little surprised how often I do refer to it to see how long I have spent working on something. I am also often surprised at the answers - when you are immersed in a problem, time passes very quickly.

Unexpected Benefits

Keeping an accurate record of my time has produced a benefit that I didn’t foresee.

Working from home allows you to have a lot of flexibility in the hours you work. You can take a break during the day, and make up the time in the evenings or weekends. The problem is, if you work irregular hours you may not keep track of how many hours you actually work. If you take a long break during the day, you feel obligated to work a few hours in the evening to make up time. However in reality, if you worked 8am - 1pm, then 4pm - 6pm, you have already done 7 hours. Despite the long break in the middle of the day, you don’t need to do another 3 hours in the evening to make a full day. Likewise, if you are up to 30 hours for the week by midday Wednesday, you can probably afford to take the afternoon off.

Keeping a record of your time can help control the amount of time you spend working at home, and allow you to reclaim some time for other activities.