The Metric January 23, 2012
Posted by Sarah in personal, progress.trackback
Even before AcBoWriMo, I was trying to use data to keep myself motivated. It’s too easy for me to putter around on little things and call it “work”, or to lose whole days to just worrying about getting things done but not actually DOING anything. So I created the Dissertation Score. The Score favors time spent writing and analyzing data over less-progress-oriented tasks like reading and “other”. The math is as follows (time measured in minutes):
Score = (writing) + (analysis) + (reading/2) + (other/2) – (freakouts/2)
I use a little app called Klok (the free lite version – it’s nagware on launch) to track my time and then at the end of the day I just drop that in to my spreadsheet and it makes pretty graphs like this:
Note how I spent about 10 days NOT doing anything productive. At least not dissertation-productive. My current target for the Studious Network’s Academic Writing Accountability group is a score of 120/day. Given how little I am able to work on weekends, though, I might revise that to trying to keep my moving average above 120. Still thinking about that one.
Excellent. Thank you for sharing (and for the tip re: Klok).
PS – hope you don’t have many ‘freak outs’ whatever they are