My son loves to build things. Here's his latest creation ...
Biking to work rocks. Good exercise, fresh air, sunshine, no gas to buy, and I can smile and wave as I pass by the cars in bumper-to-bumper commute traffic. I've been very fortunate -- almost every job I've had has been within biking distance from where I lived. There were about four years when I had to commute by car or bus, about an hour each way. I gained twenty pounds and missed out on the equivalent of two or three months of time with my family. I'm back to biking now, and I hope I never have to give it up.
A blogger known as "The Naib" has written a nice piece on the practical side of How to ride your bike to work
I recently heard about the Taste of Marin festival near where I live, and it reminded me a little of the Taste of Chicago, near where I used to live. My sister is there, although with her current training schedule I doubt that she showed up at the Taste this year ... unless Pockets was there. Maybe by next year she'll be running her own booth selling custom cookie creations at the Taste.
What struck me about the two Tastes is how the differences between them reflect the culture around them. In Chicago, the Taste means turkey legs, gyros, beer, and lots of other delicious but not necessarily healthy indulgences, paid for with tickets purchased in strips of 11 for $7. In Marin County, CA, the Taste is a $150-per-person fancy formal dinner with organic food and guest speakers talking about environmental issues. Similar names, very different events.
Where does all the time go? I know I'm dong stuff, but what did I do? It doesn't matter whether I'm busy or bored, in the zone or in a funk, when it comes time to tally up hours at my day job or to invoice my consulting clients, I quickly realize that I'm not completely certain how much time I spent on the various things I've been doing recently.
So I thought to myself, at least for the portion of time that I spend on a computer (which for me is a LOT), I ought to be able to keep better track of what I'm doing. But I'm not going to make myself open some fancy program, click a bunch of buttons and type a description of everything I'm doing each time I switch from one task to another. My work patterns are too dynamic for that, and I'm naturally averse to adding that kind of overhead to what I do. I need something more automatic.
My computer already knows what I'm doing, I just need a way for it to keep track and tell me about it. I need to spy on myself! So I wrote this simple script to do just that. Presenting winTrails (source code, .exe ). Every sixty seconds, winTrails logs the active window's title and program name to a file, stamping each record with the current date and time, like this:
Sat 2007/07/14 06:23 explorer.exe C:\misc
Sat 2007/07/14 06:24 explorer.exe C:\misc
Sat 2007/07/14 06:25 Thunderbird.exe Inbox
Sat 2007/07/14 06:26 Thunderbird.exe Compose: Re: question
The log file records are tab-delimited, so they can easily be imported into a spreadsheet where they can be sorted, summarized, sliced and diced. In the future I'll post some other scripts that I use to quickly summarize recent activity.
The great thing about logging both the program name and the window title is that I can look at the data at two levels:
- a general overview by program -- for example, I spent 47 minutes processing email in Thunderbird and 32 minutes doing system work in puTTY
- more specific tasks by title -- the time spent in Thunderbird included 4 minutes reading a client's question and 7 minutes composing a reply
It's not perfect, of course. The script doesn't know when I stop to take a phone call, or if I walk away from the computer and leave a window open, it will look like I was running that program the whole time I was away. I usually use the 'lock workstation' feature though, and winTrails doesn't log anything if no window is active. A screen saver on a short delay would have a similar effect.
One of the benefits of tracking time this way is that I can start to hold myself more accountable for the time I spend. If I look back at one day's log and realize that I spent way too much time on random web surfing, maybe the next day I'll try to be a little more focused. If I'm successful, it will show up in the log and I'll feel good about it.
How do you keep track of your time? Leave a comment and share your experiences and tips.
- The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
- Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as
self-sufficiency. Man is a social being. Without interrelation with
society he cannot realize his oneness with the universe or suppress his
egotism. His social interdependence enables him to test his faith and
to prove himself on the touchstone of reality.
--Mahatma Gandhi, 1929
- When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
- Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
- Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality. Independent people who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players. They're not coming from the paradigm of interdependence necessary to succeed in marriage, family, or organizational reality.
The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!" And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you!"
I've written a conversion program that translates HTML files in TiddlyWiki format to the XML data structure used by Tudumo. The current version supports titles, tags, and notes. Future versions may add support for dates and other options.
I wrote and tested it using data in MonkeyGTD 2.1 alpha r91, but in theory it should work with almost any version of TiddlyWiki.
tiddly2tudumo.exe -- compiled program
tiddly2tudumo.au3 -- source code (autoit3)
Enjoy. Comments/questions welcome.
My wife and I went to Six Flags today. I'm not as young as I used to be. Not over the hill yet, but definitely noticing a difference. I used to ride coasters all day and keep coming back for more, but today I rode two coasters and saw one show and was wiped out, ready for a nap. We had a good time, enjoyed some very nice weather, and it was nice to have some time walking around just the two of us (the kids were doing other fun things today, they've actually already been to Six Flags this season and will probably go again).
And I managed to take only one work-related call all day. :-)
(originally posted 14 June 2007)
For the first time in my life, I can say that I've read the entire
Bible. For the past year, I've been receiving a few chapters each day
via email from BibleInAYear.org. I've also been using the freeware tool dictator to streamline the reading of the text, so it only took a few minutes each day.
I
still wouldn't claim to be an expert, but it has certainly been
interesting to walk through the entire book in a systematic way. The
discipline of doing the reading first thing each morning has also been
positive, as it sets the tone for the whole day.
(originally posted 13 June 2007)
My kids and I got to play with some dry ice yesterday — I had almost forgotten how much fun that stuff is! The kids were fascinated with the home-made fog. Check out the Saturday Scientists for some "cool" (-109.3oF!) things you can do with dry ice.
(originally posted 11 June 2007)
I've been playing some with Tudumo
recently, and I think it's got great potential as a to-do list manager.
Very simple, elegant and intuitive to use. Well suited to GTD.
To get a jump-start on populating some Action Items into Tudumo, I wrote a quick-n-dirty script using AutoIt
that takes a text file containing one-line task descriptions and pastes
each line into a new Action item inside Tudumo. The result is a
"poor-man's import" function that allows me to take lists from other
software and transfer at least the basic info into Tudumo. Grab the
script source code if you want, of if you don't use AutoIt you can just run the compiled version of the script.
6/12 update: Richard (the author) responded:
Thanks Richard, that does work. I'll still hang onto this script because I may extend it later to include processing for additional item attributes like date, tags, and notes.You should be able to either:
1) Drag and drop text into Tudumo
(I think dropping on any item will do it), or
2) Move up/down to a position and
"paste" copied text.
Both should create a bunch of actions, one action per line.
