I have a problem. Or rather, I had a problem. This problem has gone on for the last four years, and this year I am finally doing something about it. In my role as a Master Teacher, I have a role statement on file with my Dean at at the University. It says that I will spend 57.5% of my time on teaching activities, 17.5% of my time on service activities, and 25% of my time on “other” which is a lot of administrative and recruiting tasks.
But how much time do I actually spend on these activities? Am I even close? Is it 80% teaching, and 10% service and other? Who knows. I do my job, and I write well, so my reviews have been accepted.
But how much time do I actually spend during the work day on these areas? Not a clue. The clock just keeps spinning, and I do my work.
And so, my efforts to track my time. I started by search out some other academic sites where they explained how they tracked their time. From those searches, I learned about RescueTime.com. I use a PC and Android, so the Mac specific programs were out.
I used rescuetime.com (the app on my phone and the software on the computer) for two weeks before I started working on something new. Don’t get me wrong, rescuetime.com is a solid piece of software. My problem is the way I work. As a Master Teacher, I am observing Pre-Service Teachers frequently. This requires using word, and a web browser for searching ideas, and calendars, as well as one note where I keep information. Rescuetime on the computer tracks these as three separate functions; each website, and one note. So, if I put in “observation” into the app on my phone, I just doubled my time tracked because rescuetime thinks that the time was distinct. This means I regularly worked 13 to 15 hour days in an 8 to 9 hour workday. This was not going to work.
But, I use IFTTT.com on my phone. And I use Google Sheets. Can I connect them?
Sure I can.
Using the “Note” feature in IFTTT, I have the note set up to drop a line into a Google Sheet. This note is whatever I type in, so I can type “commuting from UNR to O’Brien.” IFTTT drops a time stamp and note into the sheet (it can do more, but this is all I need).
Then, when I am done, I click the button and type in “Done”. Then type in the next task when I start it.
The blue field is a drop down I created using the “Data Validation” feature. So yes, I have to go in and categorize each task, but I had to do that in rescuetime as well, because it wouldn’t track the variety of tasks I had very well. (at all).
Next, I use the command, =split(A144,” at “,false) to split the date and time in one cell into two cells and then the command =TEXT(D143,”MMMM”) to turn the date into the month. That matters for my tracking later.
Finally, the reason why I have to do a “done” at the end of the activity is to get elapsed time. I have a simple =E144-E143 to calculate the elapsed time.
That’s it. That is the entire process of tracking time. It takes me about 3 seconds at the beginning and 1 second at the end of a task to log the note and end the note. Then, once a day, I can go back, categorize the notes, and drag the rows down in yellow. This gives me an output like this:
Using a Pivot Table on a separate tab, it sums the time across the categories, giving me the time for each category, and the second column is the average time for the category. So, for example, I spent 1 hour, 24 minutes commuting today between schools (3 observations) but each commute was only, on average, 17 minutes long.
I also get this:
Where I can break it down month by month (hence the reason why the January was so important earlier in the spreadsheet design.) And, because I am a little bit mathy at times (stop laughing, I see you) I have this:
That giant spike for “NVTC Admin work” was the cause of all this work. Most of that was the time spent the first two weeks of January working in Digital Measures to build my annual review document. Yes, it took a LOT of time.
But, as the semester and year moves forward, it will diminish. I will add monthly bars on this, so I can see the trends of months, not just totals. Would you want to see the spreadsheet? I am not sure why, other than to torture yourself.
IFTTT.com and Google Sheets is an amazing combination. I use it in several different ways, but this is by far, one of the most time saving way. I spend about 5 min per day now on this, instead of 15 to 20 on rescuetime.com, and this is giving me the results I need to show my supervisor and my Dean how my time is being spent.
Hope this helps someone else!