No problem, I love talking about my systems!
Yep, I have toggl running in my browser on my home computer as well as my work laptop, all the time. Iāve tried using the mobile app but frankly itās terrible, so I generally donāt track in detail while Iām out and away from computers ā when I get home Iāll mark the time as āGot groceriesā or āBus home + Got dinnerā or āVisited Christinaā or the like. Iām not too fussed about making sure Iām tracking how much time was spent in transit versus at the grocery store or whatever, so that doesnāt bother me.
I use the time tracking as a way to NOT switch back and forth between tasks, if I can help it ā keeping the data clean encourages more singletasking, which is a feature for me, not a bug. If I do end up multitasking (this happens a lot when Iām chatting with people online while doing something else) I mark the time spent as āChat w/Richard + Feed Alexā and categorize as whichever task got the majority of my attention/whichever tasks is lower priority and I wish I hadnāt done.
I donāt actually forget to switch that often ā maybe once a day, on average; after 4+ years, it really is pretty ingrained. In general, also, I have a pretty good time sense (helped by 4 years of time tracking!) so if I realize I missed stopping and restarting the timer, I can usually figure out approximately when the task switchover happened. For instance, if I forget to stop the timer on āGet ready to goā when Iām rushing out the door for work, I know approximately when the bus arrives, so I can backcalculate when I left the house, etc.
My granularity varies based on what Iām doing and how close to a computer I am. Work actually done on a computer gets listed in detail and in small time chunks, such as āSet up data prep script to run on regular serversā, whereas, say, watching my daughter might just be listed as āPlayā or āTry to settleā.
Toggl auto-completes descriptions, so I try to re-use the same descriptions when I can (for ease of analysis later, and also less typing), but thereās nothing formalized about them. I do have specific āclientsā (which I use for broad categories of things such as āWorkā, āMeā, āFaffing Aboutā) and āprojectsā (which are slightly more specific groupings like āSocial Interactionā, āHouseworkā, āScrapbookingā, etc), which is how I do most of my analysis later.
Iāve found it pretty useful to have this kind of data; I was able to use it to break down (in terrifying detail) exactly how much time I spent working on my dissertation, and recently I made a lovely graph showing that it was taking on average 30% longer to get my daughter to sleep compared to 2 months ago. I canāt say this data is necessarily actionable, but itās always been nice to know where my time has gone.
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