Recently, I have had to keep track of estimated and actual time spent working on a software project that I have worked on for a class. However, this was not my first time using estimates and actuals to keep track of my work. For my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college, I have diligently kept google docs which listed my assignments for the week and for each day, and the day before or morning of assignments being due, I would put time estimates for how long each assignment would take that day so that I had an understanding of how to manage my time well. It allowed me to be diligent about my time, and also to feel gratification of looking back and realizing how much work I had put in. So this assignment feels very familiar to me. Actually, I have stopped keeping track of my work time since my freshman year, and my grades have actually gone down some since then. While this decrease in grade point average could have been due to other factors, I cannot help but acknowledge that the estimation and actuals data that I kept actually helped me.
In the past, I have used a simple online stopwatch and timer to keep track of the time I spent working. Since this technique has worked well for me in the past, I utilized it once again for this project. I feel like I could have done a bit better of a job, as sometimes I forgot to stop the timer when using the bathroom or taking a break, and sometimes I had to guess how much time I had spent working before taking the break. However, I felt like my technique worked well, and I feel like my times recorded were relatively accurate.
In my opinion, yes. Like I mentioned before, I have actually been doing time estimations for my schoolwork for years now, and it has helped me a lot. The tracking has also helped me a lot on this coding project. In addition to keeping me diligent about my work, there is actually a bit of motivation to having a clock record my time spent working. If I only put in 20 minutes of work and then stop, then I feel like I am clocking out before I should. This will make me more motivated in the future to work for longer periods of time to get the gratification of seeing a stopwatch with at least an hour of work time on it. It is honestly quite useful to see the estimates versus actuals for the tasks because it helps me to get a better grasp of how long tasks tend to take. This allows me to plan out my schedule to appropriately allow enough time for each task. Additionally, like I mentioned earlier, it is also gratifying to see the time spent working on something.
Tracking effort is a relatively easy thing to do, especially if one is using a simple software like an online stopwatch. It takes very little time, but seems to provide some significant benefits, at least for me personally. I haven’t used more advanced softwares like Wakatime yet, but I don’t know if I will, because the stopwatch method is working very well for me right now. I will likely continue to track my time in the future, and possibly my techniques will become more refined over time.