It's hard to have great weird ideas when you're tracking every billable minute

It's hard to have great weird ideas when you're tracking every minute to determine who it gets billed to. The cognitive overhead of deciding which part of your brain gets dinged for each good thought gets in the way of flow.

Some recommendations on time tracking software via an evening on twitter and jabber from the cafe (I love mobile jabber as a way to unobtrusively get good ideas from someone else):

mitten recommends Slimtimer ("All your timesheet are belong to us") in her post internet finds.

This is my new favorite tool for freelance work. I don’t have to think, I don’t have to calculate, just press stop and start when I’m doing various tasks and spit out a report at the end of the month. And it’s free!

anotherjesse recommends Jabber::Simple by blaine as a toolkit for building Jabber applications, e.g. a Twitter based time keeper. I think all I'd have to have would be something that listened privately and kept a log, but then the mind starts to wander into nice things like ways to figure out where the bus is from an IM or Twitter and not from a browser.

credits: Peter Kaminski from Socialtext for the phrase "great weird ideas"; Caterina Fake for the phrase "cognitive overhead" as heard on a Tod Maffin interview on a CBC Radio One.

Previously: It's hard to have great weird ideas when you're busy closing trouble tickets.

Technorati Tags: greatweirdideas, cognitiveoverhead, twitter, jabber, blackberry, cariboucoffee, slimtimer, mitten, timesheet, ruby, aata, theride, annarbor, googletalk, socialtext, flickr, cbc, rt

Comments

[John Hritz]

I've been playing with David Seah's Emergent Task Timer flash application. It contrasts with SlimTimer by optional ringing a bell every 15' so that you can note what you're working on. Think of it as doan meets program counter profiler.

I know what you mean about intrusive timekeeping. I've found it hard to strike a balance between being reminded of short tactical decisions that have a big downstream impact vs. being pulled out of an otherwise deep, rich period of concentration to feed the watchdog timer.

As I write this maybe the answer is to identify blocks of time during the day when your must likely to be creative to go "off the clock" and use a more mindful approach otherwise.

I'm still experimenting...