Monday 15 October 2018

Who wants some pie?!

I have always admired Jo's monthly pie posts. I have a thing and love for all things scienc-y and spreadsheet-y, but I am usually not organized enough to keep them myself. I even tried to keep track on the days worked on each project briefly, but...that didn't last long. And besides, plagiarism stinks, right? Sooo...no fancy pie for me. Unless...

Well, when I did the Longest Day (or weekend, in my case SAL) in June (another one of Jo's babies), I realized how many lovely WIPs I have, and how terribly I am neglecting most of them. I didn't really know what to do about it, but the thought stayed on my mind as I visited other blogs and saw the many, many ways people will arrange their rotations...until a few weeks ago, I finally had an idea: I'll be picking one of my WIPs at random and work on it for an extra ten hours, while still keeping up with my current projects. The goal is to make it through at least one of these random-rotations each month.

So far, so good - only problem was how to measure the ten hours, since I've never really been keeping time, either. So naturally, I went to the app store and tried out a few (one seemed to think it was appropriate to add an extra 24 hours to every timer running past midnight) until I found Timesheet, a neet little app that let's me track different projects, lets me add or remove time at will (in case I mess up)...and let's me create neat spreadsheets and statistics for each day, week, or month! Do you see where this is going?

Now I can create those lovely pie diagrams at the end of each month as well...and they are logging total work time instead of days (which is good, since I'm working on 2-5 projects on any given day, anyways!). I'm not actually sure whether I will show them each month, that is still kind of Jo's thing, but I can have them and look at them, and keep track of my random rotation too. Just to give you an idea what I'm talking about, here's the pie for half of September - I didn't actually start using the timers until the middle of the month:






Oh, and about that random slot? In September I drew...Fire and Ember, which I would have been working on anyways. So I finished that page, and drew the next one for October...which was The Puppeteer, which I am working on EVERY DAY. I was behind by about to weeks though, so I'm taking the opportunity to play catch up. Hopefully the random thingy will start playing nice soon-ish!

4 comments:

Pamela said...

Very interesting!

Astrids dragon said...

I admire those who can keep track of their stitching, good for you! I'm constantly stopping, starting, and taking too many breaks.

Jo who can't think of a clever nickname said...

The more pie the merrier! Anyway, I got it from someone else in the first place.
I can't do a time tracker because I get interrupted so much at home, an hour there is not the same as an hour at my coffee morning for example! But I shall follow your pie with interest. And custard. Need custard with pie!

rosey175 said...

I like this Timesheet idea. I had tried logging relevant days/hours on my desk calendar but fizzled out about halfway through the year. Maybe digital is the answer! (or more discipline on my end hah)