Me and My Time

Disclaimer: This post will only be of interest for the truly dorky-at-heart. I will accept no liability for any wasted time or annoyance this may cause. You will not get this time back.

I have some good news and some bad news: I am continuing to get to work on time, but that in no way guarantees that I get anything more useful done than if I had stayed in bed.

I'm working on a project now that I have to get done roughly for the end of the month. I find some days that I end up doing everything else at work and not the main project I'm supposed to be doing, and other days I get lots done on the project. Until a few days ago, I had a bunch of nagging questions that I had no way to answer, like:

• How many more hours of work do I have left?
• Can I finish my project on time?
• Am I spending enough time on my main work in comparison to other tasks that come up?
• Am I actually getting anything useful done at work?

Now I can answer these questions, by using the geek's equivalent of real men's duct tape: the spreadsheet.

Throughout the day, every time I switch tasks, I enter what I did and how long I did it for. I also enter how much I now estimate I have left on that task before it's done. For example, if I have a 4-hour task, and I work on it for 2 hours, hopefully I think there's 2 hours left. But maybe I ran into a snag and now I think there's 3 hours left still, so although I put in 2 hours, I only got 1 hour's worth of "estimated" work done.

The output of spreadsheet is, among a couple of other things, 3 numbers.

1. Work efficiency: This is the time I spend doing productive things divided by the total number of hours in the office.
2. Focus efficiency: This is the time I spend working on the stuff I'm "supposed" to be working on compared to random things that come up (e-mail, meetings, etc.).
3. Estimation efficiency: This is the estimated hours I've gotten through (that is, what I estimate remains for all my tasks at the beginning of the day, minus the same thing at the end of the day), divided by the actual hours I put in on those tasks.

The product of these 3 numbers is my efficiency at turning in-the-office hours into estimated hours that can be taken off the books.

The results? Dismal. Problem number one is that I spend hardly any time on the stuff I should be doing. Focus efficiency has been less than 50%. Work efficiency has been ok; I've been spending about 80%-90% of my time in the office actually doing something useful. When I actually sit my butt down and work on what I should be working on, I'm getting it done faster than expected. My estimation efficiency is more than 100%.

To get this project done, I need to clear 5 estimated hours per day for the rest of the month. I've barely done this over the last two days, and I wasn't coming close before I started measuring.

So there you have it: this is how I spend my productive hours, working like a computer, at a computer, programming computers.