Tracking time & productivity in the studio

This post was going to be about the fun experiments I was doing in the studio, but, alas, the flu struck on Wednesday so that whole thing got derailed.  Instead, I'm sharing one of my current tools that I find very useful in meeting my goals.  An app called ATracker.  The free version allows only 5 activities to be tracked but the upgrade cost is under $5 if I'm remembering correctly. 

I've been using it for a couple of months now and really find it helps me track how much time I'm spending on which part of being an artist.  I usually set my weekly goals for hours of work done in a particular area since I long ago discovered I totally suck at estimating total time for a project.  This way, I just keep working at it until it's done. 

History view for this week

So, how's it work?  You add activities you want to track, I added categories (Art, biz, selfcare) and then you click on that activity when you start working on.  Click again when you finish.  Then you get to pull up the data at the end of the day or week and see how much you got done where.  I also add a note to items saying what particular art project it was so I can see how much time I'm spending on particular things.  I use 2 views:  the history one above which gives more item detail and the pie chart from the Reports, see below.

And of course, I love the color coding possibilities.  Lots of choices on how you tag your activities, great options on how you can analyze the data and so far, only one minor bug.  (Sometimes the day shows yesterday's activities when I bring up the app so I have to manually set it to the new blank day. No big problem. )  If I were rating the app, I'd give it max stars because it does what it's supposed to do very well and is inexpensive.