Today, I turn the keyboard over to Belgian astronomy student and BubbleTimer power user Tijl Kindt who is studying in the Netherlands. A few weeks ago Tijl asked me to provide him access to his BubbleTimer data in a manner that's easier for programs to use than the spreadsheet exports. I added the ability to access your data as a comma seperated value file (add .csv to the end of the web address for a day you are looking at in BubbleTimer: http://www.bubbletimer.com/days/02-24-2009.csv) and Tijl proceeded to turn his own data into a heatmap. I'll let him explain:

Hi guys and gals!

With Sean's help I was able to access the raw data of my bubbles, allowing me to write some code that analyzes my bubbles and calculates productivity in order to visualize it. This code takes into account all goal types (except weekly goals), and it favours long stretches of productivity as opposed to alternating between productive and unproductive bubbles as was proposed by Qrystal at some point. I changed the colours from my original mock-up as the red was looking a bit too depressing. With the new colour scheme the accent is on the green so it is a bit more uplifting.

Basically, you are seeing three graphs here. The first shows your productivity by day, so it shows your evolution in the past 4 weeks. In my case this shows that I had a good streak around January 20th, got less productive after that and am now getting back up a little. The second shows your average productivity by time of the day. In my case this shows that I've been most productive in the past 4 weeks between 11am and 7pm.

The third and largest graph shows your "productivity map" showing your productivity for every hour of every day in the past 4 weeks. Here you can clearly see that my sleeping pattern has been problematic in the past two weeks, shifting left and right significantly. For the math-inclined: the first graph is the productivity map averaged over time of the day, the second graph is the productivity map averaged over date.

Obviously these graphs are not exactly what is hopefully going to appear on Bubbletimer. I don't know much about web design or whatever the BubbleTimer makers are using to make this website. I wrote this code and made these graphs just to show the possibilities and hopefully get some feedback on what could be improved.

So please let me know what you think of these graphs. Do you understand them? What's unclear? Suggestions? Comments? Questions?

Please take Tijl up on his offer and provide feedback on the Get Satisfaction topic. It's a little ways out, but I'm quite intrigued by the notion of the productivity heat map and I do plan to add this kind of report to BubbleTimer. Any feedback you can provide now will make the capability that much more useful and easy to use.

For those of you that just can't wait to get a heat map of your productivity, Charlie Gilkey of the excellent Productive Flourishing blog has a free paper form (PDF) that you can use to make a heat map manually from your BubbleTimer results.

BubbleTimer can now help you plan out your day. If you fill in bubbles that are at 30 minutes or more ahead of the current time those bubbles are now grey planning bubbles. Planning bubbles are there just to let you know how you'd planned to spend your time. They do not count against goals or in the totals or charts.

Here is a shot of how I planned to spend this morning:

After doing some planning you bubble in your time as normal as the day progresses, but you are now able to see where you spent your time as you'd planned (no grey) and where you deviated from your plan (lots of grey). Eventually I'll use this deviation in some interesting data visualizations that show you how you do against your plans.

Here is what my not so on task morning looks like so far:

If you're not a fan of planning out your day, that's also fine of course. Ignore this capability. BubbleTimer is based on timing what activities emerge in your day. It's not important that you plan them out unless that's helpful to you. Doing some planning in the morning proves to be pretty useful to me in keeping my day on track and my time on activities that matter but your mileage may vary.

Two quick cautionary notes are in order: This is not meant to replace whatever you use as a calendar program. Don't try to do that. Also, this feature is to help you plan today or the next few hours. Don't go crazy and try to plan how you'll spend tomorrow and the next day and next week. As soon as you bubble in time on a day in the future the activities for that day become fixed and any activity additions and deletions you do today won't carry forward to that day.

The iPhone UI is oblivious to planning bubbles at this point. It neither displays them nor makes them. This will be addressed shortly.

To finish out the theme of more flexible goals, BubbleTimer is now sporting weekly goals. Weekly goals can be used on their own or in conjuction with daily goals. The weekly goal status is color coded the same as daily goals but uses a "to go" format that gives you a countdown of how much time remains until you achieve or exceed your goal. To make room for weekly goals the total and daily goals are using a more compact format where "h" and "m" are used for hour and minute rather than more complete abreviations. Here is what the columns look like:

Setting a weekly goal works just like setting a daily goal. Click on the dash to set a new goal or click on the weekly goal status to update an existing weekly goal. Like daily goals, weekly goals can be for less than a specified time, more than a specified time, or between two times. The dialog to set a weekly goal looks almost the same as the daily goal dialog, it just allows for more hours and doesn't have days of the week:

Weekly goals are calculated based on the start of the week, not based on the trailing 7 days. You can decide if you want your week to start on Sunday or Monday and set that in your "Profile" tab in the "My Account" dialog. The default is to start on Sunday.

As always, your feedback and bug reports are appreciated more than you know.

The next major feature I'm working on is notes and annotations of your time. There will be a few small tweaks and bug fixes before then as well so keep an eye on the blog here and on the Recent Updates page.