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?

I'm still hard at work on my more flexible goals mantra (just in time for everyone's time management New Year's resolutions) and today we have the option for "between" goals. That is a goal of spending between one amount of time and another amount of time on an activity. This is what setting a goal now looks like:

If you select between as your goal type, the second pair of selectors becomes active so you can specify a range. It’s that easy.

The goal status, activity graphs, print outs and export know about range goals, so they reflect this too.

Let me know what you think. Up next to be worked on is weekly goals.

More flexible goals. That's my mantra this week and it started on Monday (Dec. 29th) with an option for having your goals only apply on certain days of the week. This is what setting a goal now looks like:

The blue buttons are days that you want the goal and white ones are days that you are excused from the goal. Click a day to toggle it. It's that easy. All 7 days are selected by default so you don't have to do anything to get the normal behavior.

The goal status and activity graphs know what days you have a goal set for and what days you don't, so they reflect this too.

Let me know what you think. Up next to be worked on is goals between 2 times. Such as more than an hour but less than 3 hours.

Tijl started a thread on the Get Satisfaction forums asking everyone how they use BubbleTimer. It's great to hear how other people use the same tools you do, it can give you new ideas and validate what you are doing.

Here is an extract of a few points from the thread so far:

Tijl-

"Usually I fill out the bubbles every 45 minutes to an hour when I think of it. At home I usually have Bubble timer open in a google chrome window together with my gmail inbox and calendar."

"I have one activity called 'Survival' which encompasses everything from showering, eating, cleaning dishes to travelling and taking a little break."

gicard-

"What I am finding out works best for me (a non-single type) is to mainly focus on keeping track of the things that tend to get overdone or underdone. The rest can be filed under Broad categories so I don't spend too much time over analyzing stuff, which I tend to do to a flaw."

"Now I know where I can make the time so I can get to the other activities that do need to be singled out and nurtured. Things like: Exercise, Reading, Business Project"

me-

"I don't bubble in all my time. For me, it's about making sure the time during the "work day" is well spent. The "work day" for me is 4AM to 7PM, give or take an hour. I don't track time outside of those hours because I'm either with the wife or family or sleeping. I do have an activity called "Personal" that I use for many things during the 4AM-7PM block."

cephyr-

"As a reaction to the results, I am now using BubbleTimer to motivate myself to spend more time on productive stuff and less time on surfing, doing nothing, watching tv."

Qrystal-

"I use BubbleTimer to track the zone my mind is in. If I'm not sure where my time has gone, the activity gets classified as "frivoling", because that's usually what has happened."

"Paymo.biz is the timer I use to track the intricate details of what I'm doing. It helps me make sure I'm not spending too much time, say, researching instead of writing, or preparing my grading scheme instead of actually doing the grading. But within those groupings, there is no distinction on my BubbleTimer chart!"

Qrystal also weighed in via Twitter to let me know how important BubbleTimer is to her as a source of motivation to spend time well. I probably have not emphasized enough how important motivation is to effective time management. I blame my overly left-brained nature on that ommission, but it is worth noting it here because I hear motivation come up a lot when people tell me how they are using BubbleTimer.

I encourage you to leave a comment here on the blog (no registration required) or on the Get Satisfaction thread with your own story about how you use BubbleTimer.

I've had a veritable cacophony of requests in my inbox about printing from BubbleTimer. I was quite the dolt not to realize that rolling up the time spent on activities into a total in the printout was important. Well... no more. Now at the bottom of your print out is a rolled up total by activity of time for that period.

You'll see this total section as long as you print more than 1 day with activities that are bubbled.

Sometimes the details aren't even that interesting and all you want to print is the new rolled up totals by activity. In that case, there is a new option in the print dialog called "Summary Only" to do just that.

Finally, I've received a few questions about how to print from BubbleTimer. Everyone is used to printing a Web page with the browser's print function. If you try that with the main BubbleTimer page... well, let's just say the junk that will spew from your printer is not so great. To get your time formated into the nicely printable format via the print dialog, click the printer icon on the bottom right.

Last thing... just a stupid little BubbleTimer trick I dreamed up this morning. If you only want to print some of your activities, not all of them, you can't; that's not a feature of BubbleTimer printing yet. I thought up a clever work around though. Go into the sharing settings and share just those specific activities that you want to print, then go to your own sharing URL in your browser. Print from there and only the shared activities will be printed. Sneaky, huh?

We have a winner! BubbleTimer trial customer Bill bubbled the 100,000th bubble yesterday for an activity from 4:00-4:15 PM EST.

Congratulations go out to Bill, he gets a free year of BubbleTimer.

Next up is the 1,000,000th bubble. That's a big one and I'm still thinking through what the prize for that one should be. We ought to get there in the first few months of 2009 so there is still time to decide.

Back in my day... we didn't have any fancy nancy BubbleTimer. We bubbled our time with a piece of paper and a #2 pencil... and we LIKED IT!

Here is one of my daily time sheets from the March 21st, 2008. (I covered the activity names to protect my privacy.) This is from the week I got BubbleTimer to the point where I could use it for myself and so it is one of my very last paper time sheets. It is a doctored version of David Seah's Emergent Task Timing PDF with my own spin on it (the goals at the far left, some are exact and some with > and < ). In addition to the goals I doctored it up (with a photo copier and scissors) to include 14 hours. I think David's had 10 hours.. or maybe 12. Notice how I needed 2 extra bubbles to get the full day in, I stopped bubbling at 6:30 PM instead of 6:00PM, so those ran off the end of the chart.

Thanks for indulging my little trip down memory lane.

I get asked why I think it's best to manage your time in units of no less than 15 minutes. I have two very different reasons. First, you should be striving to engage in activities in chunks of time that are at least 15 minutes long (and usually much longer). There have been numerous book length studies done on working (and experiencing) optimally and they talk about the importance of entering a state of flow (here, here and here for example). Flow only happens when you have sustained your attention on something long enough that the rest of the world dissapears and you are fully absorbed. This does not happen in a couple of minutes. You can't turn flow on and off like a faucet. It takes some time.

The second reason is more important and it is that time management is just a means and not an end. The end is spending as much of your time how you want to spend it. That doesn't include spending a lot of time on time management. Sure, if you are a trial lawyer and you bill out at $300 an hour, then time tracking is an end and you need a different tool than BubbleTimer, you need something to time your phone calls down to second. For the rest of us, that's just a phenominal waste of time.

If you are spending more than 4 or 5 minutes a day on tracking your time, it's just too much. Coarse grained time tracking to a 15 minute increment helps in that regard. If you didn't spend all of a 15 minute increment on just 1 task, so what? What did you do for most of the time? Where was your head at? Bubble that and move on.... it's not about being exact, it's about seeing how you are spending your time generally and how that aligns with your goals for your life.

Photo courtesy of David Boyle in DC

I hope the few minutes a day you spend updating BubbleTimer are proving helpful in seeing where your time is going and getting on track with where you want to spend your time. I've been overwhelmed with positive feedback and with great ideas for how to make BubbleTimer better. I think that now is a good time to let you know what my immediate priorities are:

1. Keep BubbleTimer up, responsive and bug free - I'd say BubbleTimer gets a C+ grade on this so far, there's been one outage of a few hours and the number of bugs has been way too high for my liking. This will absolutely get better. I won't stand for it staying at the level it's at now.
2. More flexible goals - I need it, you need it, we all need it. BubbleTimer is about achieving your time management goals and you can't do that if the goal is not accurately represented. I'm working on goals for different days of the week and on weekly goals
3. Notes - you don't always need notes, and not all activities benefit from them, but sometimes a quick note about what you did can really help when you when you are  looking back on your time and trying to learn from where your time was spent.

Let me know what you think about these priorities. I'm always eager for feedback. You can leave a comment here on the blog, you can contact me directly, or you can join the conversation on the Get Satisfaction forum.

My main goal when adding in any new capabilities to BubbleTimer is to keep the system simple and fast to use. I promise that I am going to look long and hard at anything that gets added and I'll make sure it stays out of the way of those that don't need it and that it works as smoothly as possible for those that do need it. I want everyone spending less than 5 minutes a day futzing with BubbleTimer. BubbleTimer is just a means to an end and not important in its own right. If you are spending more than 5 minutes a day, please let me know so we can talk about ways to make it easier and faster for you.

There are a few ways to keep up to date with what's happening with BubbleTimer. You can subscribe to this blog. You can check the Recent Updates page. And you can follow BubbleTimer on twitter.

As I write this, BubbleTimer customers have filled in 70,476 bubbles worth of time. That represents 1,057,140 minutes or 17,619 hours. That's a lot of goal directed time!

At this rate, the 100,000th bubble will be bubbled this week. To honor that, I'll be doing a little give away. If you bubble the 100,000th bubble and you are a trial user, you'll be getting a free year of BubbleTimer. If you bubble that 100,000th bubble and you are a paid BubbleTimer user, you'll be getting a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate. Good luck!

Onward and upward to 1,000,000 bubbles! We'll have to do something real big for that one. If you have any ideas for what would be good, leave a comment.