Tweaking My Categories for Time Tracking

For a few years I have been using an IOS time tracking application to account for the time I spend on various Go Activities. 

It is Now Then Time Tracking Pro available only for IOS in the App Store.

I started with relatively few categories, but as time went on my categories increased. To make things easier for myself I organized my categories by color and by teacher. 

Clossius, BenKyo Baduk, and Yang all have their own color, and certain types of activity have their own color as well. In-seong Hwang falls under Yunguseng Dojang.

For a while it was sufficient to group activities of the same color next to each other, and to scroll through the list to get to the specific activity I wanted. Over time, as more activities were added, scrolling became cumbersome. The scroll to get down to Yang Lessons took some time.

A few months ago it was suggested that I only bother to count certain essential Go Activities in my tracking, which I did for a while. In order to achieve that goal I learned how to to create a nested list for a category that I named Essential Go Activities.

For a couple months I continued to track all other activities in the background but only reported on the Essential Go Activities on my blog using a filter to show only the subtasks of Essential Go Activities. 

Since then I have decided that I will track my activities for my own pleasure, NOT to convince anyone else that I am doing enough of certain activities. So the Essential Go Activities category is no longer in use, but it remains at the bottom of my list.

The most important thing I learned from that experiment of reporting on Essential Go Activities was how to nest subtasks below a main task. This offered me a way to clean up my list.

Each task in the image below has sub tasks as evidenced by the existence of a right facing carrot. I'll illustrate of few of the sub task lists.

Each Teacher has his own set of sub tasks. Ben's sub tasks are shown above.

The Miscellaneous Study category is a catch all category. If I don't have a sub task for an activity even in this catch all category I will use Miscellaneous Study without selecting a sub task. So at any time that I feel as if I am putting in the effort to study, and I have no category to describe what I am doing, I will default to using that main category. The color of this category was designed to feel neutral.

I've added some names to what used to be a generic Twitch Category which was designed to show time spent watching people other than Clossius and BenKyo Baduk on either Twitch or YouTube.

Here we see the activities of just one day showing that I had watched a Nick Sibicky video for 17 minutes.

If you are considering tracking time with Now Then, I would recommend starting by allowing the application to assign colors to your task. You can always edit them later. Start small and decide how you want to organize things as you go along.