The reporting in Toggl is top notch. There has never been a question I needed answered which the free-level reporting couldn’t answer. The bar graphs help quickly identify patterns and the grouping and summary let you know the truth: that bug that felt like it took forever to fix? It was only 3 hours. The feature you thought would only take 2 hours? It was 22.

The only way to improve your ability to estimate is to keep inputting real numbers into your brain. Over time you’ll get a feel for how long something should take.

Conversely, you can also analyze and see how long long tasks are: do they average 10hrs or 100hrs? What about small tasks, do they take 5hrs or 0.5hrs? If you know the right kind of questions to ask, and you have multiple projects worth of data you’ve analyzed, this can start showing your the health of the project.

For instance, if tasks are averaging longer in the last 3 months than they did before, why is that? One answer could be technical debt: you didn’t fully test or complete a system. Or your code is brittle, it makes more bugs fixing them.

Ratios can also be helpful and informative: If I keep a 5:1 ratio of programming vs fan interaction it tells me I have a nice balance of working on the game and educating the fanbase. If it was 3:2 I’m spending too much time talking about the game and not enough time making the game.

Question: What about time spent thinking?

After writing this article Daniel V. asked an excellent question:

What is your view on tracking time spent THINKING or other mental effort applied towards the game development that CAN’T (from my understanding) be tracked via a tool like Toggl. For example, if you are me, you might leave your keyboard to develop an idea in your head while pacing about your room.

Thinking tasks come in two types: AFK (Away From Keyboard) and Spontaneous (or Subconscious). I’ll start with Subconscious.

The mind has both an active (or frontstage) component and a passive (or backstage) component. I do not know what it is like for other professions, but programmers may relate to this: I was working very hard late into the night on a bug and just couldn’t figure it out. I finally gave up and went to bed. I dreamed about code and when I woke up, the answer just hit me. I went to my computer and within 2 minutes I had solved the problem. This is a concrete, rare, yet real kind of what I call Spontaneous thinking.

The second more common form is in the shower, or on the drive to work, or standing in line for transit, and your mind wanders to thinking about work. Or, for me, when I am play Diablo 3 I often think a lot about Archmage Rises features or solutions. All of this is sporadic, unstructured, spontaneous subconscious thinking.

I do not track this time. I’m not really sure how you could. If your shower was 20 minutes, do you log 100% or 50% or 25%? The purpose of time tracking is accurate records (inaccurate records are useless). It is very hard to be accurate about the time spent thinking while trying to sleep. Secondly, the purpose of time tracking is to estimate future effort. How many ideas will you have in the shower in the future? Or after a nap? Will you schedule work related showers and naps in order to overcome obstacles?

AFK is very much a work related task and therefore trackable. Be it working at a whiteboard, or reading a AD&D 2nd Edition book on an iPad on the couch, or pacing, those are all ways we work on a task. It is easy to track with Toggl.

Perhaps you like to pace the room like Daniel. You start the task in Toggl, maybe write some ideas in xmind. That gets you thinking so you get out of the chair and start to pace. When you return Toggl with prompt asking if the time away was work related to the task or not. If not, you discard it. If so, you can click to keep it. It is very flexible to track how you work, it doesn’t dictate ways in which you work.

Task Management: Asana