Ever heard of Parkinson’s law? here’s a definition I pulled up using ChatGPT.
Parkinson’s Law is a principle that was first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a British historian, in an essay he published in The Economist in 1955. The principle states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” In other words, the amount of time that a person takes to complete a task tends to expand to match the amount of time that is allocated for it.
Track Your Time and Stay Focussed and Get Stuff Done
Let’s use that for our work on computers, since majorty of us sturggle to be productive on computer related tasks, because there’s so many distractions that follow you all day long.
I have found that tracking time actually helps me stay focused and get work done in less time. If you are not tracking time, you are actually not knowing how long does it take to finish a particular task.
If you are getting distracted by your mobile phone, or maybe you found any interesting article on the internet, and spent a few more minutes on it before getting back to work, you’ll actually never know how much time did you spend on a particular activity. Because if you could, you would actively start focusing on the work that actually matters.
I have tried a lot of techniques to track time when I am doing something, including the inbuilt system of MacOS called Screen Time, which tells you how much time you spend on a particular app.
Like for today, it shows that I spent more than two hours on Twitter and Instagram, and just one hour inside Google Chrome.
Macbook thinks it is my productivity time as I spend it inside Google Chrome but I actually may have spent half of my time on Youtube.
So, this is why if you precisely want to track where you are spending your time you need to have an app tracker installed.
I am currently using Timemator after trying a few of them. I think it is quite amazing time tracker because of its capabilities of automatically starting and stopping the time tracker on the basis of inputs I have given for each task.
The work on my computer which I consider my productive work, is writing articles or editing videos or doing some research work. And this time tracker precisely lets me track the time I spend on each of these activities.
And later I can get an overview of the time spent on the activities for a Day, or Week or Month and even the Year.
You can also set $ value of every minute which is a great tool for freelancers who want to bill their clients on the basis of time they spend on projects.
I use it to find out how much time does it take me to write an article or edit a video so that I can plan my time accordingly, because it is going to be roughly the same amount of time every time have to write an article or editor video.
How does the Timeator App work?
Once you have installed the app it can be controlled from the Menu bar on your Mac from where you can start or stop the the time tracker. The timer runs in the Menu bar so that you can quickly look whether it’s tracking the time and how much time you have spend on the task so far.
From the Menu bar itself, you can create a new task, or switch to a different task you have already created.
If you notice there is a Power icon (⚡️) on some of the task, it means that it it starts and stops automatically as per the instructions given inside that task,
For example, for the Writing Articles task, I have set it up to get started whenever either of the conditions are met.
Timemator I will look for a matching browser window title, or the matching website url opened in one of the tabs that is active. The timer will start when I am in on the browser window for 10 seconds and stops when I am away from it for 30 seconds.
And not just for browser windows or website urls you can also select the applications are the folders you are working inside and whether or not they are active.
This autumn time tracker prevents you from the hassles of starting and stopping some creative tasks which you may forget doing so.
For example: Timemator automatically started the timer half an hour ago, so I am able to complete the first draught of this blog post in 30 minutes.
