Chris Cairns wrote a nice post with tips for time tracking. In the post and the comments, the question of when to track time came up. Like with many things in life, with time management, the key is moderation.

Aristotle is often credited with popularizing the notion of the golden mean as the most desirable state, avoiding too much or too little of anything. I find it amusing how much deference is paid to the ancient philosophers; the golden mean can be too broadly applied and it is not the key to beauty and life as some of the Greeks believed. With those caveats in place, it is true that you will often find error at the extremes.

So it is with time management. Without question, it is foolish to spend all of the time you have here on earth without any reflection about where that time is going and if that's really where you want it to go. I can assure you, unless you are killed instantly by a bus, there will come a point when you look back on all the time that has gone before and you will want nothing more than to have some of it back. Specifically, you will want back the time that you didn't spend on the things you truly value.

On the other hand, slavishly worrying, notating, jotting, clicking or bubbling every 15 minutes of every waking day, 365 days a year like some automaton is just as foolish. Instead, track your time for long enough, regularly enough, and rigorously enough to get a sense of what is working for you and what isn't. Decide to make a few changes to reduce time wasters and increase time on things that are truly important and then continue tracking your time against your new goals until it is clear your changes are taking hold as habits. Once your change has become the new normal, you should stop tracking.

Even if you keep your time tracking down to the target 5 minutes a day or less, it is better to spend this time doing, not tracking. Unless time reporting is important to your job, cut even this small overhead out when you can.

Don't leave your re-aligned time allocation to chance though. Put a note on your calendar for a few weeks out to check up on yourself. When that day comes, track your time for a couple of days. If everything is still on track and you're still happy with the bar you've set for how you're spending your time, then you're done. Just put a note on your calendar to checkup again in a few weeks and get back to living and doing.

If instead you notice that things have slipped, then return to tracking your time. Focus more this time on finding the rituals and routines that can turn your self-conscious behaviors that happen when you are closely watching your time into long lasting habits that are less mindful.

Good luck and stay away from those extremes. Aristotle is watching.

Photo by maha-online

Those of you who are paying BubbleTimer customers know that 5% of the revenue (about 7% after credit card fees) from every paid BubbleTimer account goes to charity. You also know that you get to pick the charity your payment will benefit. To everyone that has paid for BubbleTimer so far, I sincerely appreciate your payment and the 3 charities appreciate it as well.

Here is how BubbleTimer's customer's decided to allocate their contributions:

I make the payments to the charities quarterly, and for this first quarter I decided to give the "Snooty Monkey Decides" portion to the most popular choice, Child's Play Charity. In the future I may split that portion up evenly or give it to the International Primate Protection League or the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

Maybe you've become a little immune to this kind of company giving. It is relatively common after all. You should realize though that typically when you've seen this kind of program, it's been a percentage of profits. I've decided to give a percentage of product revenue instead. This means even if BubbleTimer loses money, the charities still benefit all the same. (For the record, BubbleTimer has lost money to date.)

I wrote this post because I think which charity other people chose is probably pretty interesting to you. I also bring it up because I'm about to announce an additional way BubbleTimer users can help these charities. Stay tuned for the big announcement this week.

Ask and ye shall receive (at least some of the time). BubbleTimer is now accessible from an iPhone and iPod Touch optimized interface. If you open bubbletimer.com in Mobile Safari you will be greeted with the new iPhone login screen:

Login with your normal email and password and you will see today's times and all of your activities. Time that you bubble in on the Web shows up on your iPhone and vice versa (after a page refresh). You can see the total time for the day and for each activity and the activity totals are color coded (red, green, orange) just like in the regular Web interface:

Once you select an activity and you can bubble in your time for it. And just like in the regular Web interface, a blue bar indicates the current time and you are taken there to start:

Flick up and down with your finger to move through the hours; the total for the activity and the goal are shown at both the top and bottom of the screen:

Since you can't see multiple activities at once on the iPhone like you can on the Web, it can be a little more difficult to know if a particular time has already been bubbled. Similar to how the time display at the top of BubbleTimer, if a time has been bubbled for another activity, the border around that time is light gray.

By default you are working with today, but you can go back and see and edit the last 6 days:

The idea with this initial iPhone interface is as a companion to BubbleTimer on the Web. Use it when you are away from your computer, but it can't yet be your sole interaction with BubbleTimer. Here is an incomplete list of things you can't yet do on the iPhone:

• Register as a new user
• Add / edit or remove activities
• Add / edit or remove goals
• Bubble in a range of times at once or multiple activities for one time
• See the activity or time allocation charts
• Access days besides today and the last 6 days in the past
• Have a 15 minute chime
• See or edit any of your account or sharing preferences

These things will be added over time so that you can do more and more with your phone. If you have an iPhone please let me know what you think about the new interface. If you're not an iPhone user but are interested in mobile access, be sure to contact me if I haven't heard from you about it already.

After some free time for good behavior, Eric is now back in my basement working on categories. If you don't know who Eric is, or why he'd be in my basement, you can find out.

Many words have been written on processing your inbox to empty (called Inbox Zero for short). This is usually discussed in the context of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) system. In case it's a new concept for you, here is the best resource on the subject, Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero. And to present a balanced picture, here is one of the best resources on the opposite idea, Mike Gunderloy's GMail for Inbox Infinity.

Inbox Zero is really a specific instantiation of a general concept of GTD, which is to have inboxes to collect everything inbound that needs your attention, and then process those inboxes to empty once or twice a day, getting everything out of the inbox and into its proper place (as an actionable to-do, delegated, into a reference file, or trashed) while touching everything only once.

So many of us end up using our email inbox as a (poorly functioning) to-do list that the email inbox has gotten the most attention, but there is another inbox that gets far less attention, and it has been vexing me for years. The browser tab.

At any given time I usually have 30+ browser tabs open on 2  computers for a total of 60+ tabs. Firefox crashes used to clear them out for me every week or so, but better stability in Firefox and automatic tab session saving means they never get cleared out now unless I make it happen.

Here is a snapshot of my Firefox windows at this moment:

Why so many? It's not that I'm lazy or messy. I'm a very hard worker and a bit of a neat freak. The problem, I now realize, is that I use tabs as a to-do list. There are tabs that are open because I'll need them when I get to a particular item on my to-do list, and there are tabs that represent something to do (or in some cases, just something to read) that is not otherwise on my to-do list.

So... you may still be saying, "Why have 60 tabs? Just put the item on your to-do list and shut the tab." I do that on occasion, but frankly, it's a big pain in the butt. Copying and pasting a bunch of web addresses into and out of the to-do list gets old quickly. It's just easier to keep the tabs open.

What's the downside with 60 tabs? Same as with email. I lose a ton of time touching each tab over and over again (some of these tabs stay open for weeks!) going back through the same tabs over and over again trying to find the one I want and to keep the number of open tabs down to a manageable 3 dozen. (Lots of open tabs also makes Firefox use lots of memory.)

I've struggled to think up anyway to make this better until it dawned on me, every email client worth a darn has picked up on this problem and now makes it easy to convert an email into a to-do. I need a browser/to-do list combination that makes it easy to convert a tab (or set of tabs) into a to-do and then to convert the to-do back into the tabs when I'm ready to do it. Either direction should be just 1 click.

Any suggestions? Does such a thing exist? Anyone found a different solution to achieving Tab Zero? Anyone want to take the idea and build it (feel free to take the idea and the name "Tab Zero" if you'd like)? Please. Unless there is already a solution I don't know about or someone grabs the idea and builds it, I'll probably end up trying to solve it myself.

I was talking with a friend today about BubbleTimer, and he told me he was struggling deciding what activities to track and what his time goals should be. Over on the BubbleTimer forums, there have been some dicussions about having so many tracked activities that BubbleTimer becomes unweildy. I have some advice for you if you have either problem.

If you are stuck, not quite sure what activities and goals to track, or if you just aren't sure if the activities and goals you have are "right", then you should try this "Areas of Focus" excercise. It was posted on January 2nd by Andre Kibbe on his Tools for Thought blog.

In the exercise you create a mind map to help discover and refine your areas of focus. You can do this on paper or with a free online mind mapping tool. Get the details by reading the blog post. While the exercise was not explicitly designed as an input into time managment, your resulting map is the perfect thing to harvest for BubbleTimer activities.

Even though I felt like I had a handle on my time management, I was in a reforming mood after New Year's Day, so I went through the exercise myself. It was definitly worthwhile! I was flirting with a new project (something for the iPhone) and being able to visualize my areas of focus forced me to admit that it would stretch me too thin.

After initialling populating my map, I realized that I could organize it into three broad categories: growth activities that develop new skills and knowledge, income generating work, and recreational activities. I realized that I was suffering from being too fuzzy in my focus on the growth activities area, which was also the area I decided was the most important. I was able to really nail down some tangible growth activities to do and now I'm tracking how much time I spend on them in BubbleTimer.

What if instead, you have the other problem, too many activities. I'm working on adding categories to BubbleTimer. These categories will be collapsible and probably color coded, so that will help if you are dealing with a lot of different activities. There are two other ideas that can help.

First, take a couple of minutes to decide if you are tracking activities with the right level of granularity. You've already made the decision to only track your time in 15 minute increments because you know that tracking time is a means, not an ends, and that it is inherently imprecise. So likewise, question the activities that you are tracking. Is knowing that you are spending about 15 minutes on "Activity A" and about 15 minutes on "Activity B" more helpful to you than knowing you are spending about 30 minutes on "Activity AB"? What are you going to do with the knowledge? Challenge each of your related activities in this way. For some of them, you'll have a good reason and a plan for what you will do with the knowledge, so keep them both. But for those where you won't benefit, consider if a less granular activity "Activity AB" would work just as well for you.

If after eliminating activities that are too fine grained to be helpful, you still have more activities than are easy to work with in BubbleTimer, you may want to look at what an enterprising BubbleTimer user, Qrystal, came up with. As a temporary solution until BubbleTimer has categories, Qrystal is using special characters to group like activities into categories (by using the same special characters) and to visually distinguish the different categories (which is what the color coding will do). Take a look at her list of categories below to see what it looks like. Thanks for the tip Qrystal.

It is cliched to blog about your New Year's Resolutions on New Year's Day, and this blog entry is longer than usual, but do indulge me please. 2 of my 4 resolutions are time management focused, and I've gotten pretty good at this resolution thing, so I share some advice in the context of my own resolutions.

My first resolution is about book reading. I read a lot for school, I read quite a bit for professional development, and I squeeze in time to read for pleasure. I spend a couple of hours reading every day but Arthur Schopenhauer and I also spend time worrying about reading.

Late in 2008, I realized one of my biggest reading problems is how many books I try to read concurrently. I don't want to admit how many that is (you'd get close to running out of fingers to count them with). This causes problems: wasting time renewing library books 3 or 4 times, a too rare sense of satisfaction in having completed a book, and trouble in continuity and remembering where I was when picking back up a book. Finally there is the trouble of the physical books themselves. They become scattered about, so I waste time finding the one I want to read, or I read the book that's close rather than the one I want to be reading.

My resolution is to read just 1 book at a time. Resolutions are useless without a solid plan of action. With a few moments of thought I was able to pin point a likely cause for having so many books going at once. I've not been willing to let a book go that isn't worth finishing. So I've committed to STOP reading any book that I'm not completely happy with. Next, I gathered up all my in progress books and serialized them into a stack. I pulled the top book off the stack, Bill Bryson's "Shakespeare: The World as Stage", and committed to only read that book. I'd been reading a page or two of it a week for months, but with only Bill's book to read I finished it just 2 days later on Christmas. It felt great. The plan is working! Next up was something I added to the top of the stack, a Christmas present from my wife, Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body". At my old rate, I might have nursed this book along for the better part of a year, but here we are, 6 days after Christmas, and I am almost done with it. I'm really liking this resolution. I think I'll read many more books this way in 2009 than I have in previous years.

My advice: read 1 book at a time and don't put good time into a bad book. More generally, decide if there are other areas of your life that would benefit from harsher quitting criteria or a more serialized focus in 2009.

My second resolution is to spend more time with my pets. 2008 was a tough year in the Johnson family as we lost 3 elderly pets to old age. Our first dog, a beautiful (come cantankerous) mutt named Bocephus, who was just a tiny bit older than my kids and my marriage, died at age 15. In December, our trusty Basset Hound, a rescue dog we adopted named Steinbeck, died at age 12. Days later, my office companion of 8 years, Monkey the guinea pig, also passed away. Monkey was to be my daughters first pet until we found out she is incredibly allergic to guinea pigs. He's been my daily companion in my cottage office ever since. As is usual with death, I regret not having more time with these great animals, so I've resolved to spend more time with my pets.

More important than the resolve are the concrete actions. I've done two things so far, I moved the 2 rescue box turtles from the back room into the front room of the office with me. It's not that they appreciate human interaction, but at least I can keep a closer eye on them. They also went to the vet for their first checkup in 15 years last week (they are doing well). The second thing I've done is to put a goal to spend > 15 minutes a day interacting, training, petting and playing with my 2 office rats, a delightful pair of blue rats named Carolina and Savannah.

My advice: maximize the quality and amount of time you spend with both your 2 and 4 legged loved ones.

My third resolution is a renewed focus on blogging. I've done a good job of posting here on the Being and Time blog every couple of days, but it's been easy since there has been so much BubbleTimer product news. There will continue to be a steady stream of BubbleTimer news, but I have quite a backlog of general time management topics to blog about and I've not been doing a good job of working those into the mix.

My other blog, Art of the Product, is about creating software products (probably not interesting to most of you unless you work in software) and it has gotten less regular posts. I really enjoy the writing I do on Art of the Product so it's been a pity that I don't do more of it. I have the resolve, I need the plan of action. Rather than posting haphazardly, I've put together a schedule. I'm pretty good at executing things I plan for and commit to writing, so this alone is probably enough to really boost my blogging output. I'll do a good job of following the schedule as long as I don't allow myself to get overly optimistic during scheduling. In addition to the schedule, I've setup a BubbleTimer weekly goal to spend at least 2 hours a week blogging (You too will have weekly goals in BubbleTimer very soon).

My advice: for activities like blogging that are amenable, plan out a conservative schedule and write it down. It's one thing to think, "Hmm, I haven't blogged anything this week.", it's quite another to know you are scheduled to write the post on The Existential Angst of Time Management today.

Lastly is what I jokingly call my computing resolution. It's more of a quick checkup than a resolution. As someone that spends 8-14 hours a day on the computer (about 8 on weekends, closer to 14 on some weekdays) it makes a TON of sense to spend some time (and money) making sure my computing environment is the best it can be. Two things have really bugged me towards the end of this year. I usually have one or more virtual machines running a guest operating system to help in testing other browsers such as Google Chrome and IE 7 and IE 8. Those virtual machines use a lot of RAM so I upgraded my main development machine from 4GB to 8GB of RAM. It was very inexpensive to do and the machine runs quite a bit better when the virtual machines are active. It's a win.

The second annoyance I decided to address is screen real estate. I'm not short of it by any reasonable standard, I use two huge displays on my main development workstation. But that means I have a third big display connected to my laptop that sits idle the majority of the time. I should put that third display to use throughout the day and get 1/3 more usable screen real estate (I can't get enough frankly). I won a bid for a 2nd video card for my main development machine from eBay and a KVM switch from Buy.com so I'll be able to put that 3rd display to use rather than having it sit idle for much of the day. These items have not arrived yet, but I'm confident it'll be a good improvement.

My advice: if you spend more than a couple of hours a day computing, take a few moments to take stock of your computing environment and plan a change or two targeted at the most annoying aspects of your current computing environment. Just a few minutes, or a few annoyances avoided a day will really pay off over a full year.

So there you have it. My 1 completed and 3 planned resolutions. I know some experts say to focus on just 1 habit change at a time, but that's never been my style (see the only 1 book at a time resolution!) If you can limit your ambition to just 1 resolution, that is probably best. The key though is to not just have the resolution (which implies you have the resolve!) but also have the plan. The concrete steps you are going to take to make it happen.

What are your resolutions for the year? More importantly, what's your plan?