Time is the finite resource that we all share. We share, too, the befuddlement in how it’s spent. It seems that we are equally terrible at remembering what happened in the past and estimating how long something will take in the future. Having worked in project management for years, Emmanuel Pont knows full well everything…
Greg Kroleski has been tracking his time for the past six years, starting when he was 20-years old. Using a spreadsheet he designed himself he collects how much time he spends in eight different categories: Survival, Labor, Social, Spiritual, Mind, Expression, Body, and Distraction. In this talk, presented at the San Francisco QS meetup group,…
We’re fascinated by self-tracking projects that extend over long periods of time, and at the upcoming QS Europe conference we’re going to hear from two artists who have been making work out of novel personal data extending back for years. Since 2004, Alberto Frigo has taken a photograph of every object he holds in his dominant…
How do we spend our time? Jared Chung was curious about how he was spending his days after he transitioned from his role as a consultant into his new startup venture. Inspired by pervious Quantified Self talks he decided to start tracking his time and his daily activities (work, exercise, sleep, etc.) using Google Calendar….
Sacha Chua started tracking time to find out where she was spending time and how she might change her patterns. In the video below, she explains what she learned, including how quickly her interests change, how she chooses to break down her time, and how the tracking helps her focus. Be sure to check out…
Adam Loving wanted a very lightweight way to track what he did each day, without tweeting it to the world. He built a simple system where he can tell Siri what he did, and it gets recorded in a database. Some data gets automatically entered through if this then that. Adam found that it has…
We got such great feedback on the orignal NFATW post that we decided to turn it into a regular feature. Every few weeks be on the lookout for new posts profiling interesting individuals and their data. If you have an interesting story or link to share leave a comment or contact the author here. Michael…
Buster Benson of Habit Labs likes to experiment with productivity, among other things. He uses RescueTime to see which apps and websites he spends the most time on each week. The winners are his text editor (for coding) and Gmail. In the video below, Buster talks about the ease of different kinds of tracking, from…
Catherine Hooper has been tracking how she spends every hour of every day for the past 3 years. Why? To make sure she is living by her priorities. She defines her priorities, turns them into actions, then schedules them. Each week, Catherine sits down with her calendar, looks at what she already has on her…
Some time ago I was asked for the ultimate productivity tip, and instead of giving a straightforward take-away, I said that in the end the answer is “it depends.” That wasn’t a cheap shot because what works for you might not work for the next guy, and vice versa. Sound familiar? It’s the same case…
From the New York QS Show&Tell meetup group – Colin Schiller talks about how his productivity changed after having a baby. He experimented with using the Pomodoro Technique and only working eight hours a day. For four weeks, he tracked all the work activities he did in each 25-minute work segment. Watch the video below…
A post from Michael Nagle, host of the Boston Quantified Self Show&Tell, recapping the QS meetup that took place on August 10th 2010 at MIT’s Media Lab.
When am I most productive? Bill Jarrold asked himself this question and showed us his answer at the most recent Bay Area QS Show&Tell. He did an analysis of his command line logs and charted how many UNIX commands he issues by hour of the day. What Bill found was that 3 pm was his…
My nephew sings happy birthday while washing his hands, a trick his mother taught him to keep him focused for at least ten seconds while cleaning up. Measuring elapsed seconds is one of the simplest techniques of self-regulation, but not so simple that an inventor named Charles T. Collopy didn’t try to patent a device…
