Where Does The Time Go?

Some people have asked where my time is spent, now that I am working from home.  I don't keep track of non-computer time, but I do keep track of when I am on my laptop, partially to see where I am spending my time, and partially for billing reasons. I found this handy software called worklog.  The author's site appears to be down, but since I get it from Debian, I never actually looked up the author's site until now.

Here are the numbers since I started tracking in November: 

Nov  9 - Nov 26:  126.33 hours (7.02 hours/day)
Nov 27 - Dec 20:  205.71 hours (8.23 hours/day)
Dec 21 - Jan 28:  208.41 hours (5.21 hours/day)

December was a busy month, because one client had a large release, and another also had more work than average.  Christmas through January has been a nice break.  Below, I show the break-down for one month, which is probably reasonably typical of the other months.  For January, it shows that somewhere around 60% of my time (an average of 3 hours a day) is what I would put in the "required" category for running the business, and the rest is more optional.

January:
Non-Lime Daley Computer time:
  • Blogs: 6.4%
  • Facebook: 0.6%
  • Checking email/miscellaneous: 25.8%
Lime Daley computer and phone time:
  • Coding for LifeType, bug reports, forum help: 7.8%
  • Lime Daley maintenance, improvements, sales: 14.2%
  • Clients who pay me by the hour: 36.1%
  • Emails/Requests from web hosting clients (support included in hosting cost): 10.2%

 

Posted by Jon Daley on January 28, 2008, 2:15 pm | Read 9918 times
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Comments

I suppose there is another way of looking at the numbers, and that is simply the number of hours that I am holding a laptop or a cell phone, and that makes it seem much larger, though I suppose at a regular "desk" job, that number would be higher than what I have now.

Posted by jondaley on January 28, 2008, 2:44 pm
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