Goals

1. Track how your time is spent
2. "Trick" yourself into getting the things you want done, done
3. Stop wasting time buried in distractions and procrastinations

Motivation for creating this

1. I have found that this system has been enormously successful as a motivation tool
   • It does follow various guidelines set out in psychological literature
2. I wanted to be able to access it from any computer
3. I wanted to allow others to give it a shot and maybe it is a useful organization strategy for you too

The Trick

The reason it works is that via some very simple data analysis, you can see the effect your procrastination is having on your ability to do the things you actually want. Some of this has already been enabled:

1. Calendar heatmap is implemented for visualizing at what times of day you do a task
2. Stacked area chart is implemented for visualizing how much time is spent on each category, with a vision of how much time is being Tracked in total.

If you want a sneak preview of the vision for the future, check out:

2. Crossfilter
3. dc.js

How To

1. Group your tasks into categories (e.g. for a student, each class might be a different category)
2. Fill the tasks into your categories (e.g. a homework assignment might be a task)
3. If it's useful, add subtasks to the tasks that have substantial subcomponents
4. Sit for an extended period of time solely focused on accomplishing your task
5. Record the time spent actually focused (obviously cheating just defeats the purpose)
6. Do this every time you work on one of your tasks

Become obsessive but be picky

• Only track the things that really matter to you
• Obsessively track the things that really matter to you
• The point here is to quantify the time you spend doing the things that really matter to you
• This way you can know that you are accomplishing your goal of increasing/decreasing the time you spend doing the things that really matter to you