Coming Soon: Hourly Diary

Have you ever wondered where your time went?  I built Hourly Diary for Android in order to collect data on my use of time throughout the day and track relevant statistics and trends arising over time.

The amount of time we have in our lives is finite, so it’s prudent to make the most out of this renewable resource. The first step in this process is to figure out how you’ve actually spent your time.  If I ask you how you’ve spent the last 24 hours, you probably can’t readily and accurately remember a large chunk of it in detail.  If you’ve tried a time management app, you’ve most likely been asked to fill out a table with the times of the day when you worked on specific tasks and realized the futility of trying to remember what exactly you were doing several hours earlier at specific times of the day.

There’s also a second class of time management apps that ask you to press a button when you begin a task and another when it ends so you can record the exact time spent.  However, you will soon  realize that you’ll frequently forget to hit the “start” and “stop” buttons,  especially if you’re overwhelmed.  This derails your efforts at tracking your time so you might try even harder at remembering to hit the buttons to track your time.  But the increased effort you spend in micromanaging your time auditing app ends up becoming a significant overhead and undermining your overall productivity.

There’s a third solution, and that’s the heart of my app, Hourly Diary.  Although it’s definitely not perfect or fool-proof, it’ll address the difficulties I’ve faced while using the most common types of time management apps that currently exist.  Hourly Diary streamlines the time recording process by pinging you on your phone every hour on the hour with a notification and asking you to briefly record your activities in the past hour. This shouldn’t take more than maybe 3 minutes of your time and you can easily get back to the task you were previously working on without losing your train of thought.  The image at the bottom contains the form that you fill out every hour to record your activities for that hour to the left as well as screenshots of the statistics activity to the right.

Because I couldn’t find a time management app that could automatically remind me to write down my tasks on a regular basis before I forgot them, I built Hourly Diary.  I will release this app on the Google Play Store for Android users in a few weeks and I hope you’ll find value in it as well, so stay tuned!

 

Hourly Diary is now available for Android!  Click below to download!