A few months ago I shared some of the paper Emergent Task Timer forms I used before I wrote BubbleTimer. These were printed from David Seah's PDF and had been tailored a bit with scissors and a copy machine to better fit my needs.

In that post I promised to share what BubbleTimer looked like in the early days. Here is installment #1 of that promise. The earliest recorded history of BubbleTimer (source control checkin) is from April 20th, 2008. At this point I was already using BubbleTimer on a daily basis, as limited as it was:

Here are some of the things that occur to me when I look at the old version:

• Like David's paper forms, you couldn't mark a full 24 hours.
• At this point the system supported just 1 user and there was no login.
• I couldn't yet page between days (I had to edit the web address manually).
• I couldn't yet add, change, or delete activities and goals (I had to edit the database manually).
• A lot of functionality was missing: printing, exporting, sharing, charts, the chime, range clicking, multi-tasking, planning bubbles.
• No penciled in bubbles (not even the idea for them yet actually).
• "Exercise" was spelled right (BubbleTimer launched with a default activity called "Excercise").
• Not enough Carolina Blue!

Yet despite all of it's limitations, BubbleTimer helped me build BubbleTimer. I set a goal to spend time on it every day, and little by little, BubbleTimer was built.

I hope seeing some of BubbleTimer's history is interesting, but more than that, I hope it inspires you to keep making time for your goals. No matter how modest or gand they may be, they'll never get achieved unless you invest some of your time into them.

15 minutes? An hour? How much time doesn't matter. What does matter is that you carve a little time from all the other activities in your life that don't matter as much as your goals and dreams. When you look back in a few months on what you were able to accomplish with just a little time each day, you'll be amazed. I guarantee it.

I don't make enough time during the day to do nothing but just think. Let me be completely honest. I really mean I make almost no time.

I work in a detached home office so I have no commute or maybe I'd try to steal that time. I work hard and I fill up my day completely. I'm either with my family or I'm doing something "productive" at all times. There really is no other time.

The moments when I am alone with just my brain are usually when I'm doing some task on auto-pilot. But even those times I tend to steal for other purposes. Doing laundry? That sounds like a good time to catchup on podcasts. Exercising? I think I can read at the same time. Time alone with the mind is very rare. It's pretty much limited to the 5 minutes a day in the shower.

What a 5 minutes though! Not a shower goes by where I don't get some great new idea to try, or crack some hard problem that's been bugging me, or break down an amorphous task into an accomplishable plan, or remember something really important that's slipped through the cracks. I REALLY enjoy my think time. The return on time invested is the highest of any part of my day.

I've decided that 5 minutes is just not enough of a good thing. Why? I don't have paper in the shower so sometimes I forget my think time thoughts. On average one day a week goes by without me taking a shower. Shhh... don't tell! And finally, when I leave the shower I usually feel like there is something left in the mental tank, if I only had a little more time.

There are obvious diminishing returns here. 5 hours a day quietly thinking and your friends and loved ones might have good reason to start calling you lazy. Instead, my new goal is a modest 15 minutes. 15 minutes a day alone and quiet with no computer and no iTunes. Just me, some paper, and my thoughts.

Try it with me? All of our thoughts deserve their 15 minutes.

Photo by lightmatter.

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.

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.