grumpywoman.com's dashboard

My ideas on how it would work with a timer...

It's fine to have the timer round to nearest 15 mins - I wasn't suggesting something that would override the bubble type 15 min measurement.

Also - make timer optional - you can still fill in bubbles with or without timer's help. You don't HAVE to use timer.

Also you can tweak any time recorded against bubbles after it's sucked data from the timer , you can change stuff.

So timer doesn't rule your life, just helps.

I am wondering how else are people recording how many 15min slots they have spent on something or are you just guessing ?

gicard makes the point about
"one show leads to another, then something comes up in
the house and I forget about bubbletime"

I agree this is an issue as I've done this a few times myself :-( but i don't see how that's any different when you're recording time yourself ie inaccuracy -
- there is a tendency to record an hour of tv because that's what you meant to watch not the second and third hours

just because some of the time you forget to turn off the timer doesn't make it a bad idea the rest of the time - I just started using a timer for one week and I find it works about 80% of the times that i switch activity ie i do remember mostly

Also with the new chime kicking in, you'd be aware of time passing and timer running...

I am currently using the freshbooks free iphone app as a timer with a free account there - just as an experiment - this allows you to not record the time logged if you wish - you are not enslaved by the timer

Tijl point about
"The whole idea of David Seah's 'Emergent Task Timer'
is that you time YOURSELF" is fine but doesn't that
mean you're having to scribble notes through the day on
what times you changed acitivites?

Or do you have a perfect memory / ability to estimate
how much time you spend on something. I find that if i
estimate, i tend to underestimate my timewasting
activities. What i like about a timer is it helps you
stay real about how much time you're actually spending
on stuff.

My feeling is that it should be an option for those of
us who don't want to have to keep little stickies
noting when we started work on something. It wasn't my
intention to suggest this as a compulsory requirement
for usage or a driver of the system. I agree that would change the feel of Bubble timer totally and not want you'd want.

I'm thinking more like the way you have a pop up
calculator on your Mac or PC = you use it as a tool
when needed but you're not obliged to spend the whole
time "in " the calculator if you don't need it.

So the timer I envisage would not be filling in bubbles
as it goes, rather it would ask you - when you stop it -
or change activities, how you'd like to deal with the
data ie select what activity you won't to chuck that
last chunk of time to.

As regards making the system reflect David Seah's
ideas, i will post separately on that. (I'd like to see
some of the principals of the concrete goal tracker
system working with the bubbles if poss and I have an
idea on how to do that.)

As regards Sean's point re "being prompted and prodded
to hold yourself accountable to living your life doing
the things you say are important to you." I personally
find that having a timer running and thus being easily
able to flick my eyes up and see elapsed time (especially if it's random websurfing / Youtube vids say) then this is incredibly good for focusing me back on what I am meant to be doing!

thanks for considering this , if it doesn't go ahead i'll stick with the work around I have

agree!