Article
Where the time went
After a few weeks the record of your days starts answering questions: what your time went to, when you focus best, and what usually pulls you away. Here is what each reading in Insights tells you.
The question everyone asks at the end of a day is where the time went, and the answer is almost never available, because nothing was written down. The day happened, and it left a feeling.
Untimer writes it down. Every session keeps how long it was planned to be, how long it ran, how it ended, the interruptions you noticed and whether they came from inside or outside, the task it went to, and the time zone you were in. After a few weeks there is enough of it that the record starts answering questions, and Insights is where it answers them.
Your days
The first reading is the plainest. Every day with a session on it, newest first, one small hourglass per session that ran its length. Open a day and you see it drawn as a day, midnight to midnight, with the sessions standing on it at the time they happened, and under that each session with its time, its length, its task and how many interruptions you noticed.
This is the part that does the most, and it is free. Michie and colleagues found in 2009, reviewing techniques for changing what people do, that keeping track of what you do is among the most effective there are, and that it works best when you can see the record and look back at what you meant to do. Your days is that record.
Beside it sits Coming back: how many of the last forty five days you were here at all. There is no streak to break, and the days you missed are drawn like the days you did. It is the number that says whether you are still doing this, which in the long run is the only number that matters.
What your time went to
With Plus, the record goes deeper, and the first reading is the one that answers the question in the title. Every task you finished is listed against what you said it would take: Said 6, took 9, with the three extra sessions drawn past a hairline. Under that, the last three months as a share, task by task, with the sessions that had no task in a row of their own.
After a while this tells you what your guesses are worth, and they get better, because the gap is in front of you every time. It also tells you what you actually spent the quarter on, which is rarely what you would have said. The demo account this site is photographed from spent its summer on episode five, a book chapter and a festival pitch, and a good third of its sessions on nothing it named at all. That third is a fact worth knowing.
When you focus best, and which days
Sessions by hour of the day, and by weekday, over the last year. Most people have a shape they have never seen. The demo account has a tall morning from nine to one, a shorter afternoon from three to six, and almost nothing after eight. Its best day is a Tuesday, and its weekends are a third of a weekday.
Once you can see the shape you can use it. The hard thing goes in the tall part. The email goes in the short part. And the reading called When your days run says where the edges are: when the first session usually starts and the last one usually ends, read from the last three months. For most people both edges are later than they would have guessed.
What pulled at you
This is the reading about your usual blockers, and it is built from the smallest thing Untimer asks of you. When something pulls you away during a session, you tap Interruption, say whether it came from inside or outside, and if you want, write one line about what it was. Five seconds, then back to it.
What pulled at you adds those up: how many from inside, a thought or an urge; how many from outside, a person or a phone; and a bar for each month of the last year. The demo account noticed a hundred and thirty from inside and a hundred and thirteen from outside, which is close to what most people find. About half of what pulls at you is you.
The lines are the useful part. After a month you know your usual three. For the founder they are the phone, a thought about a different project, and the door. Knowing which three is most of the way to doing something about them, and the doing is ordinary: the phone goes in the other room, the thought gets a note, and the door is the door.
Your record so far, your best, and the year
The rest of Insights is the long view. Your record so far is everything that ran here, counted once: sessions, measured hours, days with a session on them, breaks taken to the end, tasks finished, sets completed. Your best is the most you did in a day, a week and a month. The year is one dot a day, shaded by how many sessions ran, and it is the picture of a working year that most people never get to see. The holidays are holes, the quiet weeks are quiet, and the dense stretch in May and June is the stretch you remember being tired.
None of it is a score. Nothing in Insights goes down, resets or turns red. It says what happened, and after a few weeks that is a surprisingly useful thing to be told.
Your days and Coming back are free. The other eight readings are what Plus is for.