Of The Essence
08 May 2025
Tracking my working time
Throughout my time doing my part in the development of my group’s final project for ICS 314, I recorded the amount of time I took to do certain tasks to the best of my ability. I did this largely by both using a stopwatch and as well as simply recording my start and stop times on some paper or text file (for both coding and non-coding effort). I will admit, my time tracking was inaccurate at times, but I like to believe that I got the error of my actual working time spent to within +/- 10 minutes on the longer tasks, and within a minute on the shorter ones.
Benefits
Prior to each timing, I had to make an initial estimate as to how long I would complete each given task. This was where I felt like I had actually gained most of the benefits of this activity from, not the actual timing itself. The reason why is that by doing so I felt like I was setting some goal or deadline that I had to reach, which would cause me to work on my tasks much more quickly and efficiently than if I did not.
The downside to this was that I subconsciously felt like I was always being timed, and that pressure did admittedly cause me to put off tasks in fear of “disappointing” a theoretical someone. I did not expect this at all prior to partaking in this activity. I just thought it would be an interesting way to see my performance, and get some extra credit while I am at it.
Post-tracking, there were also some benefits to seeing how much time I actually take. By looking at how efficient (or inefficient) I was at certain tasks, I could adjust myself accordingly for tasks in the future. This applied to both the time it took for me to complete a task, as well as the time I would give myself as an estimate.
Conclusion
This activity was actually quite a bit more beneficial than I expected it to be, and not in a way that I expected either. By estimating the amount of time I would take and tracking it, I would get into a sort of feedback loop where my estimation would cause me to want to be more efficient in completing tasks, and the resulting time would then give me some feedback as to how to be more efficient, which would then cause me to change my estimations, and so on.
They were obviously not completely accurate, but the times were accurate enough to give me a sense of my working pace. I often took longer than I expected, and there were some hidden drawbacks such as unexpected amounts of pressure, but I believe that I still benefited from it more than not.
Time is of the essence when completing tasks after all.