Missed Part 1? Click here to read it.
So, as I alluded to in Part 1, Monday and Tuesday (days 1 and 2) were meh in terms of rocking this 5 day I Dare You to Track challenge. No light bulb moments. No down and dirty despair. Not much of anything except bit of annoyance at having to give focused activity a useful name and remembering to start and and stop the dang timer … which I admit I sometimes forgot to do or just ignored doing for certain activities.
Then Came Wednesday full of surprise and discoveries
On Wednesday I decided if I was going to get any benefit from this challenge — and, frankly, why would I bother continuing if there wasn’t? — something needed to change. Early in the day I decided to check out more fully a different online time tracking app called Clockify that many of my fellow challengers, including host Kelly McCausey, were extolling the virtues of.
There is a robust free version forever version I had actually signed up for earlier in the week but only played with the browser version a few times, which I liked a whole lot better than Toggl but still triggered my time-tracking annoyance level.
The Game Changing Moment
Then I discovered Clockify’s desktop version. Holy cow! Suddenly I’m falling in love with this free little bundle of time-management app. I found it so intuitively easy to use that my prior annoyance at starting and stopping for each focused activity became … dare I say it? … fun!
More importantly, what I started noticing were behaviors about my use of time, plus ways to better estimate how long certain tasks took me to do. And where I actually was … and wasn’t … spending focused time on. Ouch!
[Read more…] about No Fooling the Clock: Making It Over the Hump – Part 2