I promised to plan a proper routine for learning to use Timely to track my time. I don't know if Timely is the best possible time management app (as I tried just a few), but it seems to do what I want and is obviously a quality service. At least it will give me a chance to try managing my time properly and see if time management in general is something I need or want to do.

I have a couple of larger questions, that I want to answer:

Distractions

Can I use time management and Timely to cut down on distractions? Productive activity has to be postponed every time someone marches in or a funny cat video on Facebook breaks my concentration. As barring the door is not really an option, I could realistically get rid of maybe half of the distractions. There's nothing wrong about checking Twitter during the day, except if it breaks your flow and leads to checking Facebook too and browsing Imgur for 30 minutes.

So, maybe I'll make using Timely mean more. From now on:

• the clock is running when I'm doing something
• nothing else than something happens when the clock is running

This might actually make using Timely easier. Now it's been easy to just fill in the calendar in the morning and forget it completely for the rest of the day. This way I'll have to pay attention to Timely and using it and so might actually remember to use it. Also, multitasking is evil, so if I stick to these rules, my productivity will increase. No way around it.

Amount

Can I increase the amount of productive activity I can track per day? So far I have managed to track about four hours of productive activity into an eight hour day. In principle, I should be able to track about six hours of stuff per day, if I count off necessary evils like eating and waiting for a meeting to start, etc. If I stick to the rules above, six hours sounds preeetty ambitious, but as I always claim to be an ambitious person, that's exactly what I'll be shooting for.

So: using Timely only counts for the Beeminder goal, if there's at least six hours of stuff tracked in.

This might end up costing me a bundle very fast, so I better take this one seriously. Learning time management is pretty high on my "obviously especially useful stuff that I can't do at all" -list, so I'm willing to raise the stakes a bit with this one.

Let's do this.

P.S. If I stick to everything above, it should have some pretty damn interesting results. We'll see in a couple of blog posts.