McFilter

Annual Report 2007

I don't really do New Year's Resolutions, and I prefer to do my longer-term dreaming/planning as an ongoing background process rather than picking some fairly arbitrary date. However, the start of a new year has happened to coincide with developing a major new feature for tedium, and I've learnt some interesting things as a result.

At the end of each quarter, tedium now compiles a report showing you how much you've achieved and how you've achieved it. The report at the end of the year looks back over the entire year, rather than just three months, and so I can now show you my Annual Productivity Report 2007.

Over 2007 I completed over 700 tasks, although I replaced each of them with something new and a hundred or so more for good measure. Still, that's only a 12%-or-so rise, which doesn't feel too onerous.

If you look at the graph of new tasks over the year, there's a clear peak at the start of November which matches the start of my 30-in-30 challenge but isn't matched by a similar rise on the graph of completed items. I'm quite pleased with how flat both of those graphs are - I'm just steadily getting things done.

The biggest bump in the completed tasks occurs in July, which is when we were getting things finished on the house and organising moving to Italy, and you can see that reflected in the tag clouds. House and Italy are two tags I used to track everything we needed to fix up before renting our house in Cambridge, and things we needed to do for our move to Turin. The other big tags hyperfocus and thisweek show a different way that I use tags - when I'm reviewing what I need to do, I use those tags to flag the tasks that are a priority for me to address.

The main thing that the punctuality section shows is that I don't assign dates to my tasks very often. It's generally only things like dentist appointments and things that have to happen on a particular day. Fifteen tasks out of seven hundred isn't very many.

Things get more interesting in the productivity section. My productivity seems to steadily decline over the week - starting strongly on Monday and Tuesday before fading on Friday and Saturday before a suprise resurgence on the 'day of rest'. The hourly breakdown is more predictable, although it looks like I have a tendency to add new tasks late in the evening - preparing my todo list for the following day, no doubt.

Moving into 2008, I've still got a lot to do, but 253 remaining tasks is only a third of what I completed last year. There's plenty still to do on tedium, and I'd like to do a fair bit more on learning Italian. I'm looking forward to the end of March when I can compare how I've done in the next report.

Tags: productivity stats tedium report