liopic – Page 5 – Liopic on Tech

Keeping on your daily routines

tl;dr Use Routinely (android app) to keep your routines. Or Coach Me if you want to be social.

While living in Korea I used everyday ankidroid (an android app for anki) to learn and retain Korean vocabulary. The key point is use it day after day so your don’t forget what you are learning. But after I came to Barcelona I noticed I didn’t keep that routine.

How can I keep a routine? I guessed there should be some kind of app that can help me. After asking about it on twitter and doing some research I listed 4 candidates: Habit Streak, Routinely and Coach Me.

Actually I got more suggestions, but I tried to find an app that perfectly matches my needs: small, with a list of routines (things I should do everyday) to tick, and some kind of alarm that alerts me when the day is over and I didn’t finish all my routines. I didn’t want just another ToDo app. So here goes the review…

I tried Habit Streak, but found out the UI is really bad (you need to go to a submenu to tick a routine!). So I discarded it and tried Routinely: surprisingly it matches my needs. It is visually clean, with an easy interface; and comes with alarms for every routine and a widget with the number of remaining routines to do.

As I found what I’m looking for, I didn’t review any other app and started using Routinely as soon as I installed it. It’s really helping me to improve my productivity.

Actually a friend suggested me Coach Me, and it looks quite similar to Routinely, but with a social layer (“share with friends”). I guess one or another will be better for you depending on your self-control skills. If you need to show people your skill as a way to force yourself to improve, choose Coach Me. Otherwise Routinely will be good enough.

Tracking your time while working

Years ago, when I started remote-working, I realized I needed to be extremely serious with my work-time. If you work at home it’s absurdly easy to get distracted with housework around you. Or open facebook again (but thanks to a firefox plugin, Leechblock, that never happens again).

I thought I needed to track my focused time somehow. Despite there are online tools for this task, like RescueTime, I wanted something in my desktop. So I first gave a chance to Hamster-time-tracker. It comes in all linux distros, so installing it is simple, but for the best results I suggest you to set it to run at startup.

The good thing of Hamster is that it’s simple. Choose the task and start tracking. It can show you summaries with all kind of information (useful to report to your boss), but if you need anything more elaborated you can even get the raw data yourself, as it saves the tracking details in an standard SQlite database (in linux, ~/.local/share/hamster-applet/hamster.db).

I used Hamster for years, in a sick detailed way: a kind of micro-tracking. For instance, if I go to the toilet, I stop the clock; if I go to the kitchen to brew some tea, I stop the clock. This way I started to understand how I really work. In my case, in blocks of 1~1.5 hours. Also I realized that getting more than 4~5 hours of real focused work per day is impossible. Finally I understand some days I’m really productive (5 hours) while others I’m not (30 minutes).

Recently I updated my laptop and wanted to test an even better time tracker. With Hamster I can’t create subtasks easily. When working in a project, all of us start defining tasks, and splitting them into subtasks. But it’s also very common to discover, while working on a subtask, that you need to split it again. Or create an extra one, or…

I started using Task Coach, which allows you to split tasks anytime, while tracks the time. You can even track time for a particular subtask or for a task (sometimes useful when you are doing small stuff). You can set tasks as active, inactive or completed, and easily filter them to see the big picture or the detailed view.

Whatever you do, you may want to improve. And the better way is to track how you work, as a first step to have data (metrics) to analyze and improve. In my experience, tracking the time you are working focused helps you to see how well (or bad) are you doing and rewards yourself (or punish yourself) seeing the data.

Links about quality website development

Just for reference, here I’m writing down some interesting links I’ve recently seen about quality while developing and maintaining websites.

That’s enough to keep me busy for months. But these days I’m also trying ideas, using CSS3 and HTML5 features, so I’m using a lot what it could be the best website with compatibility features.

Deal with soft SPAM

Adverts are everywhere. And they try to get your focus at all prices. I hate that. Even these days, that in theory they send you proper tailored adverts matching your needs, I get annoyed… because actually you just get SPAM.

Moreover, in Internet we have something that I call “soft SPAM“, that basically doesn’t sell you anything but disturb your focus. I’m speaking, for example, about the “Who to follow” block in twitter or “Recommended pages” in facebook. It might be useful when you create a new account, but it is totally disturbing in your normal live activity.

Do you want to remove the “who to follow” block on Twitter? Just use Addblock (a plugin for Firefox, Chrome, etc that you MUST have) and create a new filter, with the following line:

twitter.com##div.js-recommended-followers

In case you want to remove Facebook’s “Recommended friends/pages” block, just use:

facebook.com##div.ego_section

After that, you live will be a bit easier 😉

Author: liopic