What did you do all day?
Posted by Kristján
Here at Causes, we’re big fans of the scrum. We may not employ it in the purest form, but it’s proven itself as a useful means of communication and, importantly, doesn’t take long. So every day at 12:30pm, we all gather next to our ticket-tracking whiteboard and start the party.
We very quickly encountered a problem – or at least absentminded ol’ me did – in the first question: “What did you do yesterday?” Pause for a second and think about that; do you really remember? Kudos if you’ve got a good sense, because whatever part of my brain is responsible for wiring up code is bigger, stronger and meaner than the part responsible for remembering that I did it. Luckily, that same part is capable of building a solution. Enter Clockblock*.
Clockblock is a lightweight means of tracking minute-by-minute what you’re doing. Your very own personal sportscaster. Like any useful space, there do exist other tools. FogBugz, for example, has time-tracking built in, and 37Signals recently released a version of In/Out into their Backpack product. As it turns out, we use both FogBugz and Backpack, so why reinvent the wheel? Well, FogBugz’s wheel is encased in the engine, and 37S’s tells you nothing more than that it’s rolling. I needed lightweight, I needed specifics, and I have perhaps an unhealthy compulsion to aggregate minute details (last.fm anyone?). Plus, In/Out wasn’t public yet.
But enough text, take a look:
Look! It’s everything I did today, sans some screen-scroll (I got in before 12:26, thanks). We can see that the scrum happened four minutes late, and interrupted a non-work activity that I’ve lovingly dubbed “Life Management” (ie, all the things I need to take care of, but am bad at getting to). Around 3, my brain kicked in and I got some solid coding done on a new part of our infrastructure, broken briefly by a flash game my friend sent me. Nearing dinner, I started to lose focus, took a leisurely time to eat and read, and then got back to task.
Interesting, right? No. The minutia of my day are not in any way, shape or form interesting. Not even to me. So what’s the point? Aggregation! Aggregate views of this data are much better than the sum of their parts. I have plans to implement a variety of fun graphs to show things like what I’m most likely to be doing at some point in the day. For now, we have exhibit 1:
Aha! If you’ll remember why we started all this in the first place, it was so I knew what in the world to say during a scrum. Well now it’s easy: I was around for about 13 hours, and 40% of my time was spent on my big project for the week (the green one). I know a breakdown of how much time I spent on precisely what, and I’m prepared. Oh, and the reason that scrum started four minutes late? I was looking at this page.
Of course, there’s plenty of room for improvement. For one, the two hours I spent playing games (that’s above average, I swear) doesn’t need to be factored into the time I was “in the office.” Version 2 is stewing in my head, but to my dismay, Version 1 did the worst thing it could have: it became usable. At that point, I was no longer forced to continue improving it, and development was replaced by the scads of new features we’re constantly building for our actual product. The plus side is that Clockblock keeps me honest. The hour I spent beating NanoWar I would have been equally happy to spend on Clockblock, so next time I’ll do that instead.