Productivity Logging & Analysis

Human beings are creatures of habit, yet we are surprisingly inept at noticing the patterns in our own behaviors. Vitamin-R provides tools that can help you identify and track the variances in your productivity habits, empowering you to take steps to resolve inefficiencies.

In the realm of personal productivity, we all tend to have times of the day when we are particularly good at doing certain types of work, and others when – no matter how much we try – we never get anything done. The same kind of rhythm can be observed on a larger scale when considering the calendar week as a whole. Every teacher knows that Friday afternoon is precisely the wrong time to introduce young minds to new ideas, and that students might as well be watching a vaguely related video. This is because the children have been learning new things since the beginning of the week, and by Friday, their brains are tiring, their attention spans dwindle, and thus are naturally less receptive to new learning.

Unfortunately, in our daily work lives, we are often confronted with the idea that all chunks of time are interchangeable and that we can just as well start a new project at 4:30 PM on a Friday afternoon as at 10:30 AM on a Monday morning. We are all guilty of accepting this false premise as part of our own individual “realities,” but there is good news. Because this stumbling block is a part of our own individual paradigms, it can be identified and addressed.

Of course, the assumption that personal performance – whether it’s athletic, artistic, or clerical in nature – is independent of natural rhythms (such as time, space, etc.) couldn’t be further from the truth. Our bodies, and thus our minds, have their own rhythms, sometimes irrespective of time, and are better at doing some kinds of things at particular times of the day, week, month, or year. Sometimes we require some time to completely immerse ourselves in a topic or task before we can really start working productively on it. Some days of the week are better suited for concentrated work, while others are more suitable for routine tasks. All these factors vary from one individual to another, and depend on the kind of work that is attempted.

Too often, we find ourselves frustrated at our inability to work with the machinelike efficiency we believe we should be able to produce, and we begin a vicious circle of negative “self-talk” that demotivates us and makes us into precisely the miserable little worker-bees we have become accustomed to seeing ourselves as. Though we are, on some level, machines, we are complex, biological machines – not simple tools like a hammer or screwdriver. This complexity naturally brings with it constantly varying conditions of many kinds, so we should not expect ourselves to function with the efficiency of an automobile engine. After all, even a motor exerts more or less effort to compensate for varying degrees of resistance (driving uphill or downhill, for instance, as opposed to driving across flat terrain). Humoring our bodies and accepting our human foibles can help us become much more productive, feel more fulfilled, and reduce frustration.

Gaining more awareness of our own rhythms can have huge benefits. Simply rescheduling parts of our work day and work week can eliminate much internal and external “friction,” and can help us get more done with less effort. Vitamin-R is a great tool for helping us gain this awareness. Since we already use it for managing our time and defining our objectives, there is very little extra effort involved in producing a reliable record of what we are working on, how long the task takes to complete, and how smoothly and efficiently we worked during a particular time slice.

After a time slice has elapsed, Vitamin-R will ask you to rate your performance and will pre-fill a log entry containing all relevant information. It will then allow you customize the log entry for an accurate, custom-tailored record of your performance, and record the time slice in the log book.

You can view the contents of this log using the Log Book, a Vitamin-R feature that provides an easy way to navigate individual log entries. To access the Log Book, click on its icon in the window title bar, or visit the Tools menu, choose Logs, and click Toggle Log Book.

Keeping a log of your tasks is useful in ways you may not expect, as well. You can use it as a work journal, allowing you to backtrack more easily to past tasks; re-examine the details that led to a particular decision; and motivate yourself by seeing how much you accomplished over certain periods, such as a week, a month, or a year.

Exporting and Syncing Data

You can export the information logged by Vitamin-R to the widely supported Comma-Separated Values (CSV) format by visiting the Tools menu, selecting Logs, and clicking Export as CSV file. This will export all time slices and is particularly useful if you want to integrate the collected data with your own billing or time tracking tools. The resulting files can be opened and edited by spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft’s Excel or Apple’s Numbers, and are the basis for data exchange with database systems, data manipulation and extraction using custom scripts, and integration with third-party programs.

Track and Fine-Tune Your Productivity Levels

An important part of the Vitamin-R approach to productivity is that at the end of every time slice, your performance is recorded in the Log Book. Using the Statistics Pad and the Log Book, you can explore the collected data and gain a better understanding of your own productivity patterns. To access the Statistics window, click its icon in the window title bar or visit the Tools menu, select Statistics, and click Toggle Statistics Pad. Alternatively, execute the ⌘-1 keyboard shortcut. You can use the popup button at the top of the pad to select different statistics, as well as filter the results by time or tag.

The Overview Chart

The Overview chart displays a summary of your time slices for the past seven, fourteen, or twenty-eight days. Each bar in the chart represents the total amount of time worked during time slices on that day. Each stacked bar is subdivided into color-coded areas representing different concentration levels. Red denotes flow, the highest concentration level achievable, enjoyed when you “lose yourself” in the task at hand. Orange represents a high focus level, while yellow indicates a good focus level. The blue areas represent the times that you were not able to achieve good focus and generally felt distracted. This chart gives you a good deal of information in context. It allows you to evaluate both the total time worked during the preceding period and how your concentration levels evolved during that period. Can you spot any patterns?

The Day-of-Week Analysis

The Day-of-Week Analysis chart is designed specifically to allow you to evaluate how your concentration levels evolve throughout the week. It shows all the data collected since you first started using Vitamin-R, so the longer you use the application, the more accurately it will reflect your typical weekday patterns.

Each bar represents, for each day of the week, the percentage of time on average that you have spent at a particular concentration level. The weekdays flow from Monday at the top of the chart all the way through to Sunday at the bottom. Days with no logged time slices will be “grayed out.”

Interpreting Patterns

If your concentration levels do not change much during the week, you are working in a sustainable manner. This is not quite the same as saying that you are working on an optimal level, but it is consistent with that analysis.

If your concentration levels drop near the end of the week, this is likely because you are overexerting yourself at the beginning of the week, and so your performance later in the week suffers. Giving yourself more time to recover by taking deliberate breaks between time slices and building renewal activities (exercise, relaxation, etc.) into your daily routine, could allow you to retain higher levels of focus further into the week. Thus, ultimately, intentional breaks help you get more done, get it done better, and suffer less fatigue during the work week.

If your concentration level rises as the week progresses, it is likely due to problems getting started on the week’s work in the first place. It may take you a few days to “get into the week,” which could happen for a variety of reasons. It could be that your weekends are too exhausting, or it could be a sign of resistance to starting particular tasks. Some people even require a deadline to overcome resistance, and so when the end of the week nears, they will self-impose such a deadline (“I need to get this done before the end of the week!”). It is also possible that you routinely fail to finish your work before the weekend, and thus have to deal with a backlog of unfinished work at the beginning of each week.

If your chart suggests either of these trends, you might benefit from one of the possible solutions discussed in the Vitamin-R User Manual.

For most of us, however, there will be a slow start to the week as we “get going.” Our performance will peak near the middle of the week, and will gradually fall as the week comes to its end. It makes sense, then, to concentrate on actually getting started on the weeks work, trying to work through each task at a sustainable level, taking planned breaks, and building renewal activities into our weekly routine.

Anomalies in your performance are often great opportunities for improvement. Can you spot any anomalies in your work week? Are there some days where it is particularly easy to concentrate and others where concentration seems unattainable? If so, take a few moments to ask yourself why this might be happening.

Maintaining Perspective

Though performance analysis can be a valuable tool to help us improve personal productivity, we shouldn’t allow it to become an instrument of self-torture, either. Even when we have all the fundamentals working in our favor (we’re working in flow, undistracted and, on most days, highly productive), we may still see disappointing anomalies in our performance. This is often because many of us have constraints on our professional and private lives that we cannot easily change. In this case, we might have to live with what represents our natural weekly rhythm at this stage of our lives.

If you struggle with such challenges, you might consider reorganizing your work routines to maximize “output” on your most productive days, and schedule less important or less taxing tasks on the days when you find it harder to concentrate. It is often highly beneficial to collect small, routine, and repetitive tasks and perform them not when and as they arrive, but in one or two batches on our least-productive days. This strategy reduces the distraction such tasks introduce into your usual workday while making sure you have something useful — but not critical, and thus stressful — to do on your “off” days.