Gain insights about where you spend your time | Super Productivity

09 Jul, 2024

Caption: Image copyright © 2018 Johannes Millan

Recently, a friend of mine showcase how they track time spent on projects on a day-to-day basis. Since I work in consulting, keeping track of time is very important. This inspired me to look at alternatives to that software, which then led me to Super Productivity, an open source task management app.

Let’s rewind a little bit ⏪⏪⏪ … let me take you back to what I used to do before Super Productivity entered the scene.

My time keeping method

As soon as I started my work day, I would open an empty page in my Rocketbook, enter the day's date and start a running log of how much time I was spending on each project in 15 minute chunks.

This method caused me a lot of headaches. If I wanted to work out the amount of time I spent on a particular project, I would have to do some arithmetic before I got to the answer. And so, I would often not bother finding out how much time I had spent on projects. This was causing some headaches for the project managers as well.

In addition, I was also only tracking time to projects, not tasks. This meant that if someone were to ask me exactly what I did on a particular day, I could only tell them what projects I worked on. I had to rack my brain to figure out what exactly I was doing for that project.

Enter Super Productivity

Super Productivity is a tool that tracks how much time you spent on a particular task. These tasks can be associated with a certain project and assigned to a certain tag.

Therefore, you can easily find out:

• What you did on any given day
• You start time and end time for that day
• And the hours that you worked during that day

You also have some handy evaluation metrics such as your productivity and mood, which you enter as a value on a scale between zero and 10. This allows you to self evaluate how productive you were and how good you feel over time. You can also add reasons for what made you more / less productive, so you can do more of the former and less of the latter.

It also comes with some handy tools like:

• A Pomodoro timer: to help keep your focus up on any given task
• A standing desk timer: to track how long you were stood at your desk (if you have a standing desk)
• A simple coffee counter: to track how many cups of coffee you had
• Cloud sync: to keep your data accessible across devices
• And more!

You can also integrate it with other services, such as your calendar to track the time spent against meetings, or with task providers such as Github, Trello and Open Project. This helps you minimise duplication by keeping a single source for your task list.

And the best part of all this is that it’s open source, which means that there are no licensing costs, and you are in control of your data. So far, 169 people have contributed to the development of the app, making it a community driven project.¹

This is the reason why I highly recommend Super Productivity.

Other recommendations this week:

• Abroad in Japan: One of the best YouTube channels showcasing Japan
• TIER scooters in Bristol: A great way to get around the city on a budget
• When Chai Met Toast live: A beautiful experience singing along and dancing to songs that felt familiar

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