There’s a few of us who enjoy a bit of personal data analytics. As I revamp my personal life style to fit in with a bustling third year workload in college, I’m always interested in where I can cut corners, or if I can find a way to improve my note-taking habits (which are quite slow) by getting some insight into how much time I actually spend/waste on doing things. More Than Time Log is something I’ve had on my iPod touch for a while: initially launched for iOS 4, the developer has made it compatible with older devices running 3.1.3 and beyond while ensuring a usable experience on the speed front. But as for how easy it is to track information, let’s dive in.
More Than Time Log keeps track of your activities and energy throughout the day. The idea is to generate reports based on how much time and energy is needed to complete a task. You also have the ability to check and report how energetic you’re feeling throughout the day.
The result: time log reports that help you analyze how much time you delegated to tasks, and when you are most likely to be fatigued throughout the day via energy reports.
The interface is interesting, mainly because of how you interact with the Time Log. Essentially a timer runs that infinitely counts in the background. As you complete tasks, you establish how much energy was required for the task, and how much time you spent on it. As you jot down how much energy you actually had in the Energy Log, eventually you can draw comparisons about where you can refocus your efforts to improve your energy throughout the day.
But as for the timer, you can only take away from the existing time lapsed. If you spent thirty minutes doing chores in the past hour, you’ll move the slider and subtract that time out before assigning it a tag and a comment. You can also select from common tasks (favorites) if you constantly study or do work.
Tags are important since they’re used to categorize your activities. Studied? Mark under a class associated with your college group. Mowed the lawn? Tag it under chores as “yard work.” You can also assign more than one tag to a task, but I felt that wasn’t necessary for my rudimentary setup.
The one thing I felt was odd was with adding tags to groups. You basically type out a tag you want to create, tap a group, then you should tap “Done” to make that assignment. Instead it adds a tag to the group, and takes you back to the tag page - so it’s like a super back button.
The Energy Log allows you to assign how energetic you feel (on a rating of one through five), via contexts. If you’re feeling like you need coffee, you may assign a low energy level. If you’re feeling super hyped for the day, you can note it and give it an energy rating of five. Your contexts can be used to compare your mood to your energy level, your excitement compared to your procrastination; anything you can think of can be measured with energy levels that you can update throughout the day.
With everything measured, reports allow you to see a visual representation of all the data you’ve been inputing. Graphs help you pinpoint where you’re spending too much time, and where you need an energy boost.
The performance on older devices is generally good, though it gets slower with constant usage - you may have to re-enter the app to achieve the lighting fast performance you expect. I’m sure this will be fixed in future updates.
Overall there are some quirks with the interface (it’s not entirely intuitive, though the videos available on Conscious Analytics website help you through it all), but the results are pretty powerful. If there was an accompanying desktop or web app where you could monitor this data outside of your phone, I could see this becoming an integral tool for those monitoring their lifestyles. For $3.99 in the iTunes App Store, you can pick up a powerful analytics tool design to keep you on track.
