What-Am-I-Doing started off a a way of accurately billing my customers - giving me a way that I know what to bill, and they are happy to pay becaus the work has been done and the value added. I do occasionally have bad days, and reduce the invoice because what I've achieved has not reflected the time spent, but generally what's fair is fair. It is, however, important to recard the time accurately, and then to make the decision about discounting once. Otherwise you end up discounting when you record the time and then discouting again when you do the invoice.

Anyway, that's not what this article is supposed to be about. I wanted to talk about the charts that I have added to What-Am-I-Doing.  I've added two pie charts and two bar charts. One pie chart shows the project split across a day, week or month, and the other shows the type or project.

This is the chart for last month. It has started being addictive - I'm lucky that I work for myself, and generally my target is to spend 50% of my time on customer paid work, not too much on admin and the remainder on learning, trying things, self development and internal projects. This graph enable me to manage this really effectively. I can view it on a day by day basis and maintain that balance, or if I'm, really busy then towards the end of the month I can see where I am and allow myself some exploration time - guilt free!

The bar / column charts allow me to look at the product life cycle for projects. The project below was a disaster (from my point of view - the customer was happy!)

What happend was that the project took the right amount of time between March July, then the customer, who had fooled us into believing that she had certain competencies and that she was looking at what we were doing all along (through phone calls, emails and meetings) then changed, and we had to spend August and September retraining.

I've added rules to the What-Am-I-Doing application so that time can be automatically allocated. This is a massive step forwards as, because of some of the ways that I work, I can often allocate a considerable amount of my time to a project without any input.

The rules are wildcard based and can be applied to either the application or the title information.

On the interface, I've added a "prototyping area". In this area, you can type the criteria for rules and see which lines in the "to allocate" area are highlighted.

I've setup about 20 rules in this way so far, and it seems to be allocating 60% to 65% of my time automatically each day.

I've added some functionailty to the What-An-I-Doing application so that trhough the interface I can now add customers and projects.

There's now 3 areas on the app main window. The left had side shows the allocated time, the centre the time logs that have not been allocated and the right hind side lists the customers and projects to allocate time to.

It's still a bit laborious (I've got plans to help this) however the information gathered is sufficicent to recognise which project the time was spent on.

About a year ago, I wrote the data capture part of an app to try to help me work out where I was spending my time. Because time was short, I left it running in the background 12 months aod forgot about it. Over the Christmas break, I finally got round to analysing some of this data.

I learnt a few things about how I work which has resulted in me re-thinking some of my proceses.

I'm now continuing to log the data, and will see what the results are for the next few months.