How an engineer reduced disruptions fourfold with Timeular

Ally is an engineer and author. She’s been using Timeular for the past few years.

“I tried to come up with activities that were broad enough for different projects yet distinct enough. Then I chose the most used ones for the Tracker.”

Ally, Engineer and Author

The challenge: struggling to maintain focus

While coding, Ally found that she was frequently being disturbed and that multiple unplanned tasks were coming her way, delaying her from her actual work and preventing her from staying focused.

She had to hand in a timesheet for her work and provide her boss with the number of hours she worked for different clients which she describes as being “more like a random guesstimation.”

The solution: keeping on top of distractions

Ally uses #hashtags for client billing. The other activities that she doesn’t need all the time are just tracked in the app.

She tracks Regular Work, Deep work (Getting Things Done),  Calls, Breaks, Meetings, Unplanned, small activities, external appointments, travel time, and education/training. For her freelance life, she tracks writing, editing work, timeline work, research, and backstory.

Within one month of using Timeular, Ally had successfully built the habit of tracking her time and it was worth the effort: “on average, I started being disturbed four times less than before.”

Ally tracked the times that she was disturbed to see how much time they added up to in total. Whenever someone interrupted her she switched to the ↯ side assigned to her Tracker. “This was amusing for my colleagues and they were like ‘oh, oh, she’s turned the Tracker to the flash!'”

The outcome: accurate timesheets and improved focus

Timeular’s insights showed her just how much she was being distracted while working, and so she decided to say no more often to things that were coming her way. Timeular’s charts helped Ally practice discipline and see her progress over time.

Alongside the insights, Timeular stopped Ally from using guesstimations and instead created accurate timesheets for her work, generated by a macro that works with the .xlsx export.

Ally’s tip: Look at your data. Again and again.”If you’re working in an office environment, you’ll be shocked how little of your day is spent on actual productive work,” Ally laughed.

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