If you're anything like me, this sounds familiar: On Friday evening you realize how much didn't get around to and wonder what kept you busy all week 🙋♀️🙋♂️
To track and understand my work better I thought about retracing my steps in git, Email, Jira etc. Each git commit has a timestamp, each email too, and calendars show me which meetings I've been in. When you bring Jira into the picture it should even show you how much meetings and other distractions affect your story points.
I've built a quick prototype to show me a charts for different tasks based on my Calendar entries (meetings, focus time, learning time etc.) and first results are quite surprising! (Programming is a side activity and not my main job if you believe my calendar ;-))
What do you guys think would something like this work for you? Have you tried something like this already?
P.S. My prototype is not yet on GitHub. But if you're interested let me know and I can let you into the private beta :-)
Top comments (5)
We built something similar and I'd love to get your take, I just popped an article up:
dev.to/bwb/deep-work-stats-how-muc...
We crunch 12 months of calendar data and try to divide it between metings, deep work, and shallow work.
I'd love to get your take and compare it to what you built?
Hi Ben, sorry for the late response. The notification must have slipped my inbox. I've built a very similar tool theworkmirror.com. It's still in private beta but hit me up if you'd like to give it a try.
I like your tool very much! I think we read the same book and focus on the same numbers :-) In my head I was just wondering how I can nudge people into more focus time, hence the integration into emails.
What do you think of that? Have you considered something similar?
Nice! Ya, we started doing something similar for enterprise companies but just hit a wall as selling to the C level was hard. It was like selling to someone who doesn't know there is a meeting problem because all the people in pain are the makers and lower down the food chain. We are pivoting now to a slightly different area.
What we did was meeting analytics for the entire company and teams so you could see how much time they had for deep work. And, we did a weekly email on Monday to start that showed managers and each team member how much time they had with custom calls to action depending on the company.
Here is an example of the email we send on Mondays too:
shepherd.com/products/meeting-insi...
We just added the email to our free app too, although it doesn't have the suggestions since that is per company.
How do you connect to email with Google clamping down on that? We didn't want to bite the huge audit fee or is that something if you just send it isn't an issue?
I'd love to try it, can i just signup on your page?
Hi Ben,
of course you can give it a try! Just sign up on theworkmirror.com.
As we get probably a little bit off topic with the "business model" conversation I would love to reply to you via email. So I'll just wait for your sign up.
Btw. I'm already signed up for shepherd. But somehow I only once received a weekly report. Also I use multiple calendars and the data is generated from the wrong one. Any way I can change this?
Best,
Valentin
Ah good question, we only support the primary calendar right now, so you would have to sign up with the direct calendar. You can turn that off for the one you have now on the app under settings too.
Thanks :)
Ben