What is JAFT?
JAFT is my time tracking app.
I made myself a time tracking app because I wanted to improve my productivity. I budget myself lots of time to work, usually in 2–3 hour chunks, but the productivity of these time chunks vary greatly. Sometimes I’ll get more done in 30 minutes than I get done in 2 hours.
What might be behind that variation? To answer that question, I needed data — so I made my own tool to gather it.
Time Trackers
Broadly speaking, existing time trackers fall into three categories.
The first type of time tracker is targeted towards contractors/employers. Usually, these trackers are for contractors to clock their hours accurately so they can bill their clients fairly, or for employers to make sure their employees aren’t committing time theft.
The second type of time tracker is geared towards figuring out how you spend your day. For example, it might tell you that you spend an hour commuting, 7 hours at work, and another hour on your phone every day.
The third kind of time tracker tracks your website/app usage. It will tell you exactly how much time you’ve been spending on Facebook, Twitter, or Medium. Apple’s Screen Time fits into this category.
While these trackers are, for the most part, good at doing what they were designed to do, they weren’t right for me. I wanted to figure out how I was spending my time when I was working. These trackers would only tell me how long I was working — not what I was doing while I was working. The app/website tracker would give me a decent idea of what I was doing while working, but the lack of customizability was still a problem for me — Screen Time tells me ProCreate is a “recreational” app and Chrome is a “productivity” app, even though I use them the opposite way.
The problem is one of scope. These trackers have a much wider scope; they’re designed to analyze how you spend time on a day to day level. Meanwhile, I’m more interested in how I’m spending time on an hour to hour basis.
How JAFT works
A picture is worth a thousand words; an annotated screenshot, a million.
You press a category to mark that you’re currently “in” that category. For example, if I’m on Facebook, I press “FB” and the timer will consider all passing time to have been spent on FB. When I press another category, the timer switches to that. Lighter buttons are productive categories, darker ones are distractions, and the user can add productive/distracting categories of their own.
Some insights
The tracker actually did yield some insights on how my work sessions go.
