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.