Personal time tracker with Ruby and Growl
April 29, 2010, [MD]
Introduction
I'm fascinated by the idea of measurement itself having an effect on behavior. For example, it has been show that simply letting people see how much electricity they are using at any given time, leads people to decrease their usage. Data is also necessary to experiment, and measure the effect. I was fascinated by the Hacker's Diet, where one of the features is measuring your weight every day, but using a moving average to smooth out the data noise caused by varying levels of water, etc. (There are a number of web apps and iPhone, etc apps available for doing this as well).
Yesterday, I came across a New York Times article about the "data driven life". They showed how the wide availability of cheap measuring instruments (the primary being the cell phone, but also GPS chips, Wifi-enabled weights etc), and programs for crunching and visualizing data, some people are tracking a range of personal statistics, such as time use, weight, mood, sleep etc. This can be used for self-experimentation, one person did several experiments to find that his cognitive capacity went up with a spoon of flaxseed in the morning.
These experiments are different from traditional scientific experiences in that they don't necessarily seek universality, rather than assuming that what happens to you can be applied to others, you are simply interested in what happens to you. Perhaps the person above is the only one reacting like this to flaxseed oil, but that's OK – he is the one who is going to be eating him – to him it's a profoundly useful discovery.
Another difference is that instead of having very targeted and well-designed experiments, these individuals often just track data over long periods of time, for curiosity, or to see if any patterns emerge. Or perhaps to try to improve on some aspect of their life, such as weight loss, or wasting less time, and using the visualization of "brutally honest" data to drive that behavior change.
How can I stay more focused online?
I work on a number of different projects concurrently, they all (mostly) happen in front of the computer, and combined with all the distractions and interruptions (an e-mail just arrived, my friend paged me, let me check this thing), it can often be very difficult to get a sense of where time went. Sometimes in the evening, I think – wow, that was another day, but what did I actually achieve? And especially this summer, as I really need to finish my thesis, it becomes important to focus more on the important tasks, and cut down on the distractions.
I came across the LeechBlock plugin for Firefox, which is designed exactly for people like me, who get easily distracted. You can add a number of sites, specify whether they should be blocked for a certain time period, or after you have used them for a certain period of time each hour/day/week. Given that you are installing it, it's impossible to make the computer completely "you-proof", so the purpose is rather designed to make you slow down when you go to Reddit or Facebook, think twice, and go back to your real work. (That said, some of the options are designed to make it almost impossible to modify/uninstall the plugin while it's actively blocking).
So I thought I'd give it a try, I installed it, and listed a number of web pages I frequently visit, but which I don't really *need*to visit... Reddit, Google Reader, various newspapers, Daring Fireball, Boing Boing, etc. I wanted to be strict with myself, to get work done on my thesis, so I set it to block all access until 6PM every day. I also moved Chrome and Safari out of the Applications folder.
The plugin does exactly what it says it's supposed to do. However, after a day I disabled it, for two reasons. The first is that although the sites mentioned above do take up a lot of my time, they are far from the only ones. In fact, that day I spent most of my time working on the P2PU, adding a Planet for example. While this is useful work, it's not related to my thesis, and strictly, it could have waited. Yet there would have been no way of blocking every web page related to P2PU. And of course, the biggest time sink is perhaps my e-mail, but it's also vital to much of the research I am doing, so I could not block GMail. The second reason was that it felt very tiresome and annoying when I did need some of those sites for legitimate purposes – connect with a researcher on Facebook, or view a film clip related to my research on Youtube, and was blocked (with no option of turning it off).
Getting a better sense of how I spend my time
So inspired by the NYTimes article, I thought it would be fun to try to track my time online, and maybe through this, be able to focus more on the tasks that really matter. I put out a question to my Twitter network: "Interesting article abt data tracking&self-experimentation. Any good inobtrusive time trackers for Mac? Sync with iPhone? nyti.ms/b4Eiro". I got a number of answers (thanks all!), and I spent some time checking some of these tools out. However, none really did what I wanted. Many of them were designed more for freelancers and others needing to track their time for billing purposes, and some were integrated with impressive project managers.
The key feature to me was the ease of entry. The whole purpose of this exercise would be to micro-measure how much time I spend on different tasks on my computer, which is often spliced in very small segments – two minutes reading e-mail, a minute chatting with a friend, five minutes writing a proposal, back to chat, back to the proposal... To be able to track something like that, I'd need a way that was incredibly unobtrusive, and easy to manage. In fact, I instinctively had a fairly good idea of what I wanted: some little tool that sat in the menu bar, which enabled me to change the category it was tracing with a mode-less global shortcut. So I could quickly do Ctrl+Cmd 1, for category one, check my e-mail, then Ctrl+Cmd 2, back to report writing etc.
However, none of the time tracking tools I found offered this functionality. They all had nice little boxes with a button to click on your mouse. But if I had to tab to find this application, and manually click on the category, it would never become something I integrated into my workflow. (Note that there are a lot of time trackers out there, it's quite possible that this exists, and I didn't find it.)
Making my own
So I could not found a tool that would do exactly what I wanted. Then I started wondering whether it would be possible to build my own tool. I realize the irony in spending this much time, trying to save time. But it's fun! My tool of choice is Ruby, and I realized that the actual tracking would be very simple – all that would be needed, would be to write a time-stamp with a category to a file. Later, a script would be able to go through that file and by looking at the various time-stamps, figure out how much time I had used.
If for example I had stamped "Sunday 3:01 PM - P2PU" and later "Sunday 3:15 PM - thesis", then the script would output "On Sunday 3:01 PM, you spent 14 minutes working on P2PU".
However this tiny script – a line or two – would have to be launched from a global shortcut. There are two ways of doing this. One is creating a service that launches the script using Automator. This service can then be assigned a global shortcut in the control panel (under keyboard). I tried this, and it worked, but it seems that you cannot edit the services from Automator, once you have created them. You can edit them manually, but the little text to execute is hidden into a huge XML file (sometimes Apple config files are incredibly verbose). In addition, you will have to create one service for every category you want to be able to trigger.
Another possibility is FreeHotKeys by Richardo Batista. It's a free download (unfortunately the disk image is SIT compressed, so you need to download the free Stuffit Expander as well – Mac nostalgia), and a small hidden program, that let's you assign random scripts to global hotkeys in a way that is much more easy to manage. I currently use this program, but the method above should work as well, and doesn't require any external programs.
Visual feedback
As
I said, the actual code for making a new time stamp is about one line
long. I simply add a time stamp (output of Time.now.to_i) and the
category as a new line to a text file. However, I would really
appreciate some visual feedback to know that this has been achieved, and
maybe telling me how much time I spent on the previous activity. There
are a few ways of creating programs with a GUI on OSX, like MacRuby,
RubyCocoa, etc. However, when I began reading up on NSObjects and
interface builder, and nib files, my eyes glazed over. It's great that
it's possible, but learning about it would require more time than I
could justify for a project designed to save time...
Then I remembered Growl. It's a small library used by many different programs for providing unobtrusive visual reminders or notices on OSX. I looked around to see if there was a way that I could trigger Growl notices using Ruby. There is a Ruby library, but it seemed much easier to use growlnotify, a command line tool for creating notices. This way, the script could write the time stamp, and then send out a notice to let me know what was going on.
Great! Except I ran into some snags. No matter what I did, the script worked great from the command line, but when launched through the global shortcut, growl wouldn't trigger (the time stamp was still written to file). I found two remedies (1, 2), and I ended up with this, which worked perfectly (really hope the Growl team can fix this permanently!).
Status
] In
addition to generating a file of timestamps, that could then be analyzed
in any which way – graphs of time use over time, scatter plots, when
during the day are you most likely to get distracted, etc. – I also
wanted a quick status of the current day. To achieve this, I switched to
recording the time stamps in a new file every day, so that I could
quickly sort through this file and calculate cumulative totals. (I
realize this might get me into trouble for tasks that continue past
midnight, an unfortunately all to common issue. I have to put in a fix
for this.)
So I added a status script, which prints the current activity and how long you spent already, the cumulative totals for all activities today, and a "cheat sheet" for the different hot keys, and the categories which they trigger.
Having done all this, I was very content, and finally went to bed. The whole thing took longer than I had thought, because I spent some time trouble-shooting Growl, etc. But in the end, I was very happy with what I had come up with. The whole project was about 110 lines of code (including white space and comments), but worked perfectly, and even looked good.
Cleaning up the code
This morning, I sat down to clean up the code a bit. This is how I usually develop – it starts out as a simple idea, you write a few lines, try them out. Then it grows, and becomes a mess of code with no functions, lot's of code duplication, paths and values hard-coded, etc. But it makes for rapid prototyping. Then, when I've reached some basic level of functionality, I can look through the code again, begin picking out duplicated code and make it into functions, make parts of the script more robust and less dependent on me running it in exactly that directory, etc. I also added some comments. This makes the code incredibly much cleaner and neater to look at (and usually I end up removing a bunch of lines), and in addition to making it easier for others to get up to speed, it helps me a lot too, when I come back to it in a year or so.
I put all the code up on Github. Note that I totally didn't write this for anyone else, it was purely to scratch a personal itch. Due to the way Ruby works, I am never contemplating to create some kind of an installer, etc. But if you are a bit technical, and want to have a look– be my guest! Anyone can fork the code and improve upon it. Right now, the categories are all hard-coded into library.rb, and are easy to change. (The way I use this, is that 0 means "stepping away from the computer", 1-5*are different projects I'm working on right now. *6 is "goofing off", ie. any time spent on the computer not doing one of these projects, and 7-8 are to free slots for shorter-term projects. For example, I am tracking how much I'm spending on this tracker program right now in "project 1".
This was fun. Now I am going to actually use this program, and measure how effective I am. I don't know yet if I'll end up using this regularly or not, or what effect it will have, but it's an interesting experiment, and writing it was a fun exercise in how much you can do with little, when things are loosely coupled.
(I haven't written a script that analyzes the time stamp files yet. There are lot's of ways to do it, it could output different kinds of data, even automatically upload it to a web service, etc. Feel free to play with it, and if I add such a script later, I'll make it available in GitHub.)
Stian - off to be productive
Stian Håklev April 29, 2010 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus