Time flies

But after a while
You realize time flies
– Porcupine Tree

My youngest daughter, who is an excellent illustrator, has a pretty healthy habit that I don’t have. When she sits down to draw she sets a timer on her phone, so an alarm goes off once the time she has set herself as a limit for the activity is up. That way, when she stops, she rests, taking care of her eyes and her hands.

The thing is, when you’re doing what you love, time flies, especially when you get into the zone.

On the other hand, there are practical reasons to keep track of how long an activity takes you. Even more so if you develop software for a living: measuring your performance is essential. And to measure performance you have to start with time.

There are several tools for measuring the time you spend coding. Aside from the obvious ones, like using a stopwatch, the best tools are the ones that work in tune with your working environment.

I’ve tried three tools lately, and I want to share a few impressions with you.

Timing 1.0

This is an app that tracks all your activity on your Mac. You run it in the background and it keeps a record of the time you spend on different tasks.

In the image above you can see a slice of my activity on my computer between July and September of last year. It’s quite detailed; at first it’s even pretty scary to use. Version 2.0 promises improvements on that front, we’ll see if I get around to installing it.

You can turn tracking off, indefinitely or for set periods. You can also create your own activity types.

How does Timing work? You have to give it access to the Accessibility API; with that it reads the titles of the active windows and that’s how it logs your activity.

It’s a good tool for any freelancer in any line of work, not just for software developers. It’s simple, needs almost no configuration, and runs locally: nothing gets sent to any central server. Ideal for the paranoid. It costs 29 dollars for the basic license for use on 1 Mac.

WakaTime

This tool is aimed at software developers. In this case the tracking is done from an editor or IDE compatible with the service.

WakaTime is a service, not an application like Timing 1.0. The free version lets you record your time for one week; to keep longer histories you have to use the paid version (which costs 9 dollars a month, or 12 dollars for the team version).

In the image above you can see my coding time over the last week. And below you can see the breakdown by development tools and languages:

It’s been years since I developed full time. I normally write code for some personal project, or maintain a few small projects at work. As you can see, this past week I worked in Python, and I had to go over a small Scala project I wrote for my job. The IDEs I used are IntellijIdea and PyCharm.

WakaTime integrates with more than 43 editors, and all the plugins are open source, available on GitHub: https://github.com/wakatime.

That way you can see exactly what they do in each editor and find out how they determine the time you spend writing code.

In its free version WakaTime keeps a board where you can compare yourself with other programmers around the world (there are people who spend way too much time coding; there are two explanations: either they don’t sleep, or they’ve managed to hack the tracking system). The "social" side of the tool isn’t its best feature, because I think it breeds a kind of competition that adds nothing of value. I don’t see much room for the team version either, but surely there are groups of programmers who want to measure their egos on a dashboard and see who codes the longest.

What’s valuable about WakaTime, at least for me, is that it lets me see the information by project, and that lets me measure and pace my efforts. I can also use it as a motivational tool; for example, I’ve set myself the goal of coding one hour a day, which is very hard, but let’s see how it goes.

CodeAlike

This service is the most Orwellian of them all. CodeAlike aims to keep a record of almost everything you do as a developer: coding, building, debugging and interaction with the system. If you install a Chrome plugin it analyzes whether you’re visiting sites like StackOverflow and shows you an estimate of the time you spend troubleshooting, which is very cool on the one hand, and a bit sinister on the other.

This is one of those services where you need to read the terms and conditions carefully, because its plugins hand over a lot of information that goes to CodeAlike’s servers.

Perhaps the only feature of CodeAlike I found interesting is this chart:

It measures the level of focus or attention you pay while interacting with the code; the horizontal line is the CodeAlike community average. This is taken from the last two weeks, and it shows I’m a late-day creature: my peak falls between 4 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Personally I find it a tool that goes overboard on metrics, but I suppose there are people who can get obsessed with measuring every aspect of their work.

The price of this service is $12.

Why measure your time?

If you’re a freelancer and you bill by the hour, for example, knowing how many hours you put into developing a solution for your client is essential. But it’s also useful for making more accurate estimates on future jobs.

Having metrics on your performance also helps you improve, and understand your personal software development process. You can also use these metrics the same way my daughter uses her timer, to realize you’ve spent too long working and need a break.

If you cross this information with your work, for example with the information Git gives you, you can find out how much it costs you to write a line of code. You can learn whether you spend a lot of time debugging, and so become aware of what you need to improve to raise your performance.

Like any tool, these can be used for good or for evil; that’s up to you. What matters is finding the one that best fits your workflow.

Do you use tools like these to measure the time you spend working?

I’d like to hear about your experience.