Smart Time Tracking- A community jam session

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hey ya’ll I’m Zevi (they/them)

This is my first post ever on ze discourse (((and the crowd roars!!)))

As I get more acquainted inside SourceCred I am finding different parts of my brain that have been in a Rip Van Winkle type nap (if you don’t know that reference he was asleep for 20 years!) slowly coming back online. I also love that so many skills are shared in and around this community so…I thought I’d pick the brains of you… the great, the many!

What system(s) do you use to track your time contributions in and around working with SC? Spreadsheet? Notes? You don’t believe in time? Your faerie assistant handles all of that? I wanna knoooooow!

And, if you have one and you’re open to sharing access to it in some fashion-- would you reach out and let me know?

Pumped to be here and get to know ya’ll more.

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I’m so glad you’re here!!

There was an opt-in effort to track hours. Basically, whoever wanted to could fill out a spreadsheet that tracked hours and got props for it. I think @Jolie_Ze was leading that? You can see the spreadsheet here.

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Friggen stoked you’re here :smile: and congrats on your first discourse post! :partying_face:

The spreadsheet that we linked to in discord (and that @ezraU linked to above) was a thing folks were using for a while but I lost track of it. I have a real hard time tracking hours - due to constantly forgetting about it at various stages of the work-doing process - which is why I stopped tracking my own hours. I think @AL0YSI0US was the last one doing the tracking of who was doing the hours spreadsheet and then posting it in the #props channel on discord.

That said, if tracking hours is more easeful for you and the hours sheet seems like something you could work with… awesome! I think it might make sense to duplicate that one and start with a new one for 2022 - also in part because a lot of the contributors on that sheet are no longer doing work for the community.

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thanks fren! so it sounds like I should check in with Aloysious and see if that’s a task they’re still open to tending and if it is or someone else takes it over, essentially whatever hours are tracked in there get dropped by that person into the #props channel and I wouldn’t have to do that laborious task im doing rn which is documenting all of my conversations during break and dropping them into the #community:didathing. does that sound right?

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Great clarification! Alas, the hours-tracking spreadsheet is not as useful as all that. It really is just for figuring out how much time we’re spending working on SourceCred, not tracking what we’re up to or rewarding people for their time. The props related to the hours-tracker was just to say “thanks for helping us track how much time people have spent working”, not a reward/compensation for the hours worked.

(Aside: I hear that tracking time spent on work projects would be useful for you. I’m currently looking into project management software we could use, because lord knows we really need an easy-to-understand-and-edit method of planning and tracking our work. I’ve only ever project managed a team of 3 people, myself included, so like… I would dearly love input from people with more experience. )

The did-a-thing channel has been feeling quite laborious and inaccessible for a lot of people for a long time. To my knowledge, it was built as an experiment / temporary solution. We need to find/create different ways of explaining and tracking work so we can reward it.

Our stopgap solution for did-a-thing is to keep it simple. Just say “Hey, I talked to so-and-so for x time about y topic.” A quick description of why that’s important is useful for posterity and more likely to net you Cred, but you don’t need to get too deep in the weeds. If you want to describe the depths of things you learned, put it in a Discourse post!

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(An additional stop-gap: I’ve helped people get unstuck writing their did-a-things by hopping on a call and scribing what they say they’ve done! I’m pretty available for that – feel free to hmu.)

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To answer your core question…

I guess I… mostly don’t! I keep my work hours to like, 9:30 - 6 PST M-F, but I don’t track them very well. In the past, I’ve use an app on my phone called ATracker. It’s pretty bare-bones and easy to use.

I could definitely do with a better system of tracking what I’m doing and how long I’m doing it.

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this could be a good practice just to get me in the flow! wow–what a mensch! thank you for this offer <3 <3 <3

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OOO… this break down is helpful that I don’t have to get deep in the weeds of a post. I of course oriented to some of the posts that already exist and what not but until I get in the flow its hard to know how much I need to share in order for folks to “see the value” and therefore interact with it, ya know? im sure more this will become clear with time. I really appreciate your time and wisdom sharing!

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Aloysious gets real :nerd_face: :

I avoided this topic at first because I was like oh lord I could rant on this one, and I don’t wanna…yet…I’m here now though, with the capacity so here goes:

When I first got to SourceCred

I was looking for a task to pick up I really wanted to organize our Discourse {and still do} but didn’t get support around what I wanted to work on. [this happenes as people put their attention on what they want to do > autonomy > and that may not line up with another persons desires] I was desperate to participate and took the first thing that came my way. I wasnt a yes per say and i only kinda knew that then but i was still pretty conditioned under capitalism around status / “earning” my way in. That’s not actually a thing here but folx comin fresh from capitalism well it’s sorta natural thing to unlearn…

I was asked by @Jolie_Ze to take on the task of putting out weekly notifications to prompt folx to fill out the hours spreadsheet. I thought “yay I have a valuable contribution in this ecosystem”, but it didn’t feel great to have this task at all. On the doing this end I could sense avoidance from people the more i had to send these signals through the server. [this part may have been in my head but i noticed what folx were like when i dindt bring it up and i based my temp off that] It became an unpleasant task for me pretty quickly. (I wanted to be holding my own here somehow, this is what motivated me to operate outside of my integrity for a while/ not actually wanting to participate in the thing i was asking of myself and of others)

  • What and who exactly was/is this form for? I think this still needs to be sorted out / intention / process
  • I have since started tracking my own doings in life // all of life to include SC and find more value in this than reporting to SC = It's self care for me!!!

If you look at me over the months on that spreadsheet that @ezraU shared, I WENT HARD learning and wrote my time down but the density at which i wrote didn’t matter everyone got cred for logging and the spoons it took to track didnt match the reward for me // as I became more engaged not only did this form feel like me being monitored it also became quite tedious and it felt unnecessary and gamey // I found myself having headaches filling it out when I could have been on a walk or eating or anything but form input that didn’t really serve a purpose for me or the community or the product. I just stopped filling it out and checking each week to see if others still were. Eventually we stopped using it alltogether.

Things I thought about often:

  1. am i repeating monitoring practices in society???
  2. takes spoons to remember if you forget to log and the form is not personal so it was hard to enjoy filling it out
  3. felt gamey once I knew HOW to participate in SC which was made sort of like a weird game for me to figure out lol culture has since shifted to striving for transparency in places that didn’t exist before.
  4. i learned that i just didn’t know how to share what I had been up to [i personally feel secure w/o that form]

So if that form comes back, I wont Use it >> here’s why.

I track my time / manage my yes’s and no’s as I go, I trust that I will be rewarded for my contributions and will talk to people when I can’t figure out how to document my time spent on whatever

  • we have channels for this, #props and #did-a-thing // which may very well evolve as we suit SC to meet our collective needs.

I know I can stop a task or raise a flag at any point if something feels unfair / I’m not being rewarded.

Here’s what a few days looks like for me now

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My calendar is manual because I am Autistic [love the rhythm of words] and am in LOVE with the Markdown Syntax.

I learned over the break that I have always enjoyed tracking my own doings b/c autism stuff and now I dedicate intentional time with LOUD MUSIC to stimming time!!! When I got to sourcecred i had no idea what tools worked for me. I had all sorts of bad ass tools in the army but in the civilian world its shotty. I’m learning to shape the tools present to suit my needs.

This is not me trying to influence the decision that the community [especially new folx wanting to try it out] takes with that form >> simply me being totally transparent about my interactions filling it out and managing that product. I trust that my experience simply adds more data to the data set. I will support people in doing this task if they want to use it / and can do a proper handoff >> just lemme know.

Right out the gate I see lots of value in tracking your time as a newcomer, please don’t let my experience invalidate this reality. I want to share the shadow that came up for me because I think this stuffs helpful. I am an onion, many layers. In my Autism I’m not always sure how my messages will land and am learning to have beginning middle ends etc when i write. Its a mess in my thoughts translating them into text is even harder.

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