Unobtrusive time tracker, visualizing time spent with Ruby and R
March 16, 2013, [MD]
About three years ago, I read some articles about the quantified self, and how the simple act of observing something can lead to change (often in a positive direction). I've been interested in productivity tools and theories for a long time (it's a constant struggle for academics), and I thought of different ways of measuring how I spend my time. I tried a few different automatic tools which look at which applications are open, which websites you visit etc, but found that the data they generated were not that helpful. If I am on Google Scholar, am I doing research for my PhD, working on a paid research project, or just following a random thought?
So I needed something that took my intention into consideration, but did so in a really easy and unobtrusive way. I had a pretty good idea of how the tool I wanted would look - something that would sit in the menubar, and where I could change which activity I was working on with only a global shortcut. I looked around, but couldn't find any tools that really fit the description, so I began building my own. I wrote some really simple Ruby scripts to log time codes to text file, triggered with a global shortcut program, and used Growl to provide some feedback.
I wrote up the whole thing on my blog, posted the code on GitHub, but actually didn't end up using the system very much (the fate of many productivity tracking systems, I'm sure). Three years later, I've spent a lot of time working on my open academic workflow, and I've also begun experimenting with R for data analysis and visualization. I am also involved in a number of different paid projects, so tracking my time is not just for self-insight, but would also be very useful for billing, etc.
I opened the code that I hadn't touched in three years, updated it a tiny bit (I use Keyboard Maestro now, instead of FreeHotKeys), and then experimented with adding a graph. It took a bit of time getting R to play nicely with Ruby, I began with rinruby, which lets you run R commands through Ruby. However, this popped up a Quartz screen every time I used ggplot to render a graph (even if I never displayed the graph, but sent it straight to a PDF).
Then I tried to run an R script through R CMD BATCH, which worked, but took almost 10 seconds to execute. I later found out that this is an old way of doing things, and that Rscript is the new way. That worked perfectly, and it executes and renders the PDF in 0.8 seconds. I then use Pashua, which I use extensively in my open academic workflow, to display a dialogue with the graph and some extra information.
Currently, it just shows a simple bar graph of activity during the current day, but as I collect more information over multiple days, the data could be visualized in many interesting ways. I know not only how much time I spend on a certain activity each day, but also when I spend the time (and in how large chunks, how often I'm interrupted or start surfing etc). This could be visualized as time-series, and I could even experiment with correlations with other factors, whether external ones (the daily temperature?) or internal, if I track other factors (when I go to bed, what I eat etc).
Only time will tell if I keep using the system, but perhaps this possibility of using and visualizing the data will be enough incentive to track. It will also be very interesting to see how much time I actually use on various activities - for example I need to give a presentation at Beyond the PDF2 in Amsterdam in a few days - exactly how much time will it take me to prepare?
Stian
Stian Håklev March 16, 2013 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus