I've been at my new place for 3 months or so now and I'd say I'm pretty settled in by now. Over the last few months I've prioritised building relationships with my new coworkers whilst being helpful where I can. Whilst feedback has been good, I've struggled to switch off at the end of the day. The amount of unknowns you have when starting somewhere new is difficult to ignore, and I found myself losing sleep over all the loose threads that weren't tied up at the end of the day. Additionally, my morning standups were a chaotic stream of consciousness as I attemped to remember what I did the day before. It got to the point where I wasn't happy with how I was getting on.

One thing I hadn't even remotely nailed was a decent system for organising my notes, TODO list or tracking my time, the latter of which I'm going to go into detail on here. I'm not advocating or dissuading anyone from using a particular tool, it's more the process (or lack of it) that was causing me these problems. There is a happy ending here, and I'm a few weeks into micro-managing my time, and the effect has been huge both in and outside of work.

Before I go into what I did, I'll add a bit more context. I work for a consultancy, so I'm already comfortable with the idea of tracking my time and why that's important to the company I work for. I'm in a fairly simple position where I'm 100% allocated to a client, and my rate is the same no matter what I'm working on. So long as I'm doing "stuff" and being helpful, we're all good.

Here was what I wanted to record:

  1. ⏱️ Timesheets: Everything over ~15 minutes gets tracked.
  2. 🔨 Activities: Timesheets are assigned to things I do regularly e.g standups, coding, 1-1s. I'm already up to over 50 of these.
  3. 🚩 Responsibilities: Each activity belongs to a bucket that I believe are my role responsilities: "Project day-to-day", "Company big-picture", "Line Management" to name a few. Each of these responsibilities has a description to help me decide what's a most appropriate fit for an activity.
  4. ⚡️ Topics: Timesheets are also related to optional topics, for example a specific feature my team is trying to deliver.

Tracking everything helped me focus on a single task at any given time. If I felt like I didn't want to record it, that's usually a good sign I shouldn't be doing it. I decided to use notion for this, and like a true engineer I put together this ERD:

erd

Recording my time in this way allows me to report on how much time I'm spending on each responsibility (via activities) or topic. It also shows me how many different plates I'm spinning on a given day; I learned I'm doing at least 10 different things every day, and very rarely spending more than an hour on a given task. Additionally, I'm spending over 50% of my time doing "Project day-to-day" activities, and only 10% on "Project big-picture" sort of stuff. I reckon I can kill two birds with one stone here and start carving out larger chunks of time in my calendar for focus time with the aim to get the "Project big-picture" time closer to 25%. Now I've got a robust way of tracking my time that I actually enjoy doing, I'm confident I can now make that happen.