Coder, Gamer, Runner, Husband.
Over the last week I’ve been using RescueTime. It’s a neat little service that’s keeping track of what you are doing all day long on your machine (Mac or PC) by logging which applications are having the focus. On the site you can then tag the different applications with different keywords (for example, my Mail.app times are tagged with “work”, “communications” and “email”).
And, to make it actually useful, you can analyse your time spent, graphs and all! Check the product tour on RescueTime.com for more infos and some screenshots. It’s pretty neat. (Yes, privacy concerns, blah blah blah. It’s not the topic of this article, so please keep it to yourself for the moment. Thanks. :])
So far so good.
My problem, tho, is that I spend quite a bit of time both on the phone and in meetings. Naturally, RT won’t track these times, since these are basically off-screen activities. Uncool.
So after digging around in the RT log files I was amazed to learn they’re just YAML files. Eeeeexcellent. I can work with that!
But I wanted something with a GUI, something a bit “cooler” than just a Ruby script. So I took this as opportunity to get a bit into Applescript. Unfortunately, RescueTime’s Mac doodad doesn’t offer an Applescript API, and I had to improvise.
After two hours of playing around and cursing at Applescript’s syntax (they’re all on crack…), I had something sufficiently cool to show for.
So, what is it? It’s a little application that you run everytime you want to log some off-screen time. Basically, it’s just a dialog that allows you to enter a number (i.e. minutes spent), and has some buttons to either log these minutes as “was on the phone” or “was in a meeting”. If you hit “Cancel”, it won’t do anything. (Surprise.)
Let’s say I’ve just spent 15 minutes on the phone, I’ll run the application, enter “15” and hit the Return key—and the last 15 minutes will be logged as phone call in RT. The app will quit once that’s done. Another meeting, another phone call? Rinse, repeat.
Data-wise, it’ll then create a new file in the right format in RescueTime’s log directory (~/Library/RescueTime/Logs/Pending/). On the next data upload RT will pick up the new file, and it’ll appear in your stats as “manual_phonecall”. Your meetings will appear as “manual_meeting”.
Please note: Neither existing RescueTime files nor the RescueTime application will be touched or tinkered with.
Below you’ll find two downloads. The first one is the actual script in plain text. The second is the script compiled as application bundle. If you’re unsure which to pick, you’ll most likely want the latter. ;)
Have fun.
DISCLAIMER: I’ll take no responsibility for loss of data, hair or life. I am very, very sure there won’t be any losses, but still. It works for me, and I’m sharing. Use at your own risk.
I had the pleasure to watch hordes of co-workers, past and present, struggling to get through their days without going insane. The lot of them are capable people, but they appear to waste a lot of time (and nerves) by not asking the right questions when it comes to technology. And I am talking here about developers and non-developers.
Also, before I go any further, let me clarify one thing: I am writing this not to tell people they suck, but to share some personal findings and experiences about common pitfalls and how to get around them. I am aware that you can buy books about this topic by the dozen, and I don’t want to go into philosophy, so this is merely a list of tiny things that I changed on my machines that had quite an impact on my productivity. Also, all this stuff works for me — it might not for you. I’m just saying.
The general idea is to get rid of some obstacles that keep my mind from running like the well-oiled, finetuned, skillfully honed bucket of bolts that it is. This idea is neither new nor original nor mine, but hey, it’s good!
So, onwards — let me share some observations with you.
The other day I was sitting in a meeting, watching a presentation, when I noticed the constant barrage of IM presence notifications popping on and off in the lower right corner of the presentation laptop’s desktop. Approximately one every 15 seconds. “That guy came online” and “The other guy went offline” and “OMG the third guy is out for lunch now”. It was hard to follow the presentation, to be honest. The funny thing was that the presenter didn’t really seem to notice them anymore. Or didn’t care, hard to say. In that case: why did he even turn them on in the first place? Oh, wait, he didn’t, the messaging client has them activated by default. My advice: turn them off NOW. Usually these things do nothing else than stealing your attention from your actual work, either your conscious or unconscious attention. Seriously, you probably don’t need them anyways. If you want to know whether someone is on, just take a peek at the damn contact list, that’s what it’s there for.
Most IM clients have an in-your-face attitude. When there is a new message coming in, it’s slapped across the screen, on top of everything else, stealing the focus. Let’s say you’re typing a mail, looking on your keyboard, as most people do, and a new IM is coming in — the message window pops up, the cursor is put in the reply box, and you’re writing the rest of the sentence (that was supposed to be part of the email) into the messenger window. My advice: change that NOW. My client is configured to get out of my face. When a new message is received, the window is either popping up in the very background of the desktop, not stealing focus, or it is opened minimized in the taskbar. That’s enough. I’ll see it soon enough, and it doesn’t keep me from working.
Seriously, they might be hilarious at first, but the constant chirping and barking and clingclanging and dingdinging is unnerving. My advice: deactivate sounds NOW. Mostly because you don’t want your IM client to steal your attention or your focus, and sounds are the very best way to achieve that. Nice side-effect: your co-workers will start to like you again.
Many IM or email clients allow you to watch your mailbox, telling you when new mail is coming in. Constantly. That’s almost as bad as IM contact status notifications. How the hell are you supposed to follow a train of thought if shit is popping up all the time? Exactly. My advice: turn them off NOW. You have a mail client, you check it every one or two hours anyways, that’s enough.
Three words: Information inflow paralysis. I get a few hundred mails per day, something like 1 mails per minute. Mostly mailing list mails and bug tracker mails. My advice: Polling for new mails once per hour is enough. YMMV, of course. You have to answer them at some point, or even read them. At least in my profession (engineering, read: coding and fixing things) I have to do real work somehow, and I won’t get anything done if I stare at my inbox all day long.
Now suggesting this I often hear the argument “But I am supposed to answer mails right away!”. Really? I mean, really REALLY? I would be surprised. If I had to venture a guess I’d say that isn’t true for most people. Unless you’re working at NORAD and waiting for clearance to bomb Utah or Thuringia from space, it’s probably okay to take an hour or two to reply to a new mail. So what I do is keeping my mail client minimized, and taking a peek every hour.
As mentioned above, I get hundreds of emails. I’d be pulling my hair out if I had to sift through them manually. Therefore, I set up filtering rules in my email client (I use Thunderbird 3alpha, by the way). When new mails are coming in, they are checked against ~3 dozen filters. They are tagged with the name of the mailing list, they are checked for particular keywords and filtered by senders — and tagged accordingly, too. Once that is done, everything that is tagged is moved out of the inbox into a huge archive. In addition, I have a number of saved searches; one for every mailing list, one for every keyword or topic. I can see on a glimpse how many new mails came in via any given mailing list. I can see on a glimpse whether there are new mails dealing with that particular project XYZ I am working on. But first and foremost, the only stuff left in my inbox is everything that has not been processed, and that’s usually the new mail for me. No bug reports, no mailing list mails, just stuff I should probably read right away. Also, the other mails are sorted into neat piles for easy consumption whenever I have the time. So I can see that the clown-workshop-participants@example-company.com list has 3218 new mails, but I also know that this is not important and can wait.
I’ve seen the inbox of some of my co-workers, and at any given time they have a few hundreds or (deity forbid) thousands of unsorted mails in there. No kidding. I mean, WTF. How can you not feel totally overwhelmed with that many mails, read or not? It’s clogging your mind, get rid of it.
If your inbox is full, even with emails already answered, then your unconsciousness thinks something like “OMG more work” and blocks your thoughts. No good.
Threaded view is great since you don’t lose the context of a discussion. It’s a matter of taste, of course. I like it. You might not. Nice side effect: you can collapse threads.
If you open your laptop and see ~200 icons on your desktop, and you don’t think that’s too much, you’re crazy. (I’m not making this up, I’ve seen desktops like that.) Get help. Without knowing your desktop, I’m sure you could delete half of it without missing anything afterwards.
These are just a few things that come to my mind. I know that thinking about setting up 20 or 30 different email client filter rules might be a bit off-putting, but think about it — it might be worth it. You might be spending an hour or two, but imagine the benefits: a clean inbox, more room to breathe, less crap your eyes see and which causes your to ponder all the time, knowingly or unknowingly.
All of these things work for me personally. As I’ve said, YMMV. But I found that jumping through one or two hoops, like reconfiguring your IM client or adjusting your email client, was a good investment of time that helped me deal with all the information that comes my way and the amount of work in front of me.
Maybe it works for you, too. Who knows.
By now I’m thoroughly depressed when I think about our aforementioned management blogs. Today I had to learn a few things:
I am aware that our vice CEO is incredibly busy and his job with the whole quality management isn’t the easiest and most rewarding task. Subconciously, tho, I think we’re fucked already.
I’ve decided to keep my mouth shut for the next two weeks and watch the whole thing from a quiet corner.
I’ll keep you posted.
Caution, rather unstructured rant ahead
So, our internal company strategy is now mainly focussed on quality management, which, sadly is a topic long overdue. Not enough people, not enough time, to many fucking jobs in a day, the usual. Plus, an in-house communication which seems to come straight from the deepest depths in Hell. One of the more capable managers was promoted vice CEO earlier this year, and our CEO tagged him with the honorable job of straightening out the internal processes — communications, inter-department processes, everything.
Two weeks ago we had a rather lengthy staff meeting about it where they were presenting the new ideas and everything. The new guy is actually a nice guy, works for our company for a couple of years by now and knows his trades. Good for him. They’ve announced that they want to flatten the hierarchies, to strengthen the overall quality of our work etc. etc. No layoffs, tho, in the long run we will probably hire a number of new people. And they want to do it with us, not against us and not from above. Because they want it to take off, and they can’t do that without the staff. So the premise is: whatever we do, we’re trying to discuss it with you. And this time,we actually mean it. (Actually, the whole quality management idea is one or two years late. People are tired, but hey, it’s a just fight anyways.)
Well, good then. I applauded the overall notion.
(By now, they even hired an consultant who was interviewing people and assembling his findings in a report for everyone. “This is the mood, these are the problems, here are possible solutions, YMMV.” Was a good report, by the way.)
Pondering about how it can be done, I came to two conclusions. 1 - You can’t email everyone everytime you want an opinion. 2 - You can’t schedule a meeting everytime you want an opinion. So I went ahead and told them about management blogs. In great detail, actually. “See, this is a weblog, this is the idea behind it, you’d post and give those who want to discuss it the ability to do it”. The vice CEO was amazed and thanked me for the idea, and to be honest, I still think he meant it. He asked me to set up a blog for him and his team (the heads of our departments) so they can post whenever they feel like, i.e. they want/need to live that new communication thang. (In the past, decisions were made and noone was informed, which led to confusion, anger and overall pissyness. You know the score, I guess.) He knew that if he wants to break the “nothing good has ever come from the top” mood at the watercooler, he’d have to fight for it.
So I did just that. After I’ve explained the interface to them I told them four things.
Number 3 is the hardest thing. We had about a dozen applications that were rolled out in the past, and noone told the staff why. “Here’s a bugtracking system.” - “What for? … Hello?” Couple of months later: “Here’s a time tracking system.” - “Why are we doing this? … Hello?” It’s pretty bad, really. They count on us to figure it out ourselves. I’m really not sure why they won’t talk about it, but apparently in their minds the delivery is the goal. “It’s delivered? Job’s done.” Yeah. Except not. It’s really really bad.
So, the new quality management idea is to communicate to avoid and solve problems. Great idea. The vice decided the new management blog is the way to go, the best tool for the job. Yes! Everything’s gonna be peachy now!
Yeah. Except not.
Yesterday the vice CEO mailed the consultant’s report to everyone. He mentioned the blog and that it’ll be rolled out next week. My boys and I talked about it and concluded that spreading the report meant a raised need to discuss things, because that’s what they said, the report is topic to discussion. It also meant that this day was the best day to officially start the management blog. You already have your first topic, so roll with it to promote the new tool you have. There’d actually be a reason to check the blog — you could discuss the different topics right there. So I’ve told the Vice just that, and he agreed. This morning, one of his staff made the first post. “Hello, this is a discussion board, here’s the report, discuss please.” Then he mailed the URL to everyone, and that was it. When he wrote it he came to me asking which categories he should pick for the post. He was frightened and insecure about it. Well, you have to crawl before you learn to walk, right? This was a new shore for him, the whole concept was/is rather alien to him and his pals. I figured they will become more secure as they use it.
When I talked about it with my co-workers at lunch, I was greeted by shrugs. “I don’t get it.” - “I don’t understand that, what is it, a new tool we’re supposed to use?” - “Do I have to post there now? ME?” Apparently they had no idea what to do with it. The concept was alien to them as well. And it made sense they were confused — because noone explained the idea to them in the first place.
And that was the point where I felt like banging my head against something very, very hard.
A couple of problems here.
They read the report by the consultant, apparently they talked about it in one or two meetings, but the line “You, the management, aren’t vocal enough about your actions and you should fucking change that if you want your employees to fucking trust you again (fuck)” didn’t go through. (I’ve paraphrased a bit.) The post and the mail by our head of department was clearly too cryptic and vague again. Old style. No change there. (I didn’t notice right away because I knew what the idea behind the blog is.) Violation of rule #4.
The Vice didn’t hand the job to his secretary but one of his staffers. At least for the introductory post I’d have wished for a post by him. It’s about examples, about setting a certain standard, by giving your employees a feeling of “I’m trying hard not to repeat the mistakes of the past, this time we really want to do it”. Alas, he was to busy to spend 15 minutes posting the first entry. Disappointing. Violation of rule #1… in a way.
One post, one mail, everyone but a handful of people was confused. Great job. Violation of rule #3. Excellent work, Smithers.
Summary: It’s not about the tool, it’s about how you communicate, it’s about content. It’s a long way ahead, I think, but at this very moment I feel we’re doomed once again. Why? Because the management still have no real clue. If they had, if they would’ve understood the (probably hysterically expensive) findings report, they would’ve tried to change something right away. They would’ve tried to be clear and trustworthy and convincingly trying. sigh We might have upgraded our tools to be tools of the 21st century, but in the end it probably just means we’ll poke our eye out with a state-of-the-art laser-guided pickaxe.
So, what next? They’ve scheduled a staff meeting for tomorrow where they tell everyone what they want to accomplish. (I won’t be around to attend because my baby sister is getting married and we’re on our merry way to their place.) I really hope they won’t fuck that up as well.
And I really hope that when I come back on Monday, there’ll be one or two more posts in the blog and a couple of comments to go along with.
