How to track your time like a pro 🕒

At the end of 2023, I started a project in which I wanted to track my time, hoping this would make me spend it more productively. I wanted the solution to be self-hosted (no internet connection needed) and build on open source technology.

Tracking anything often starts with a spreadsheet. A great open source program to create and manage spreadsheets is LibreOffice Calc. Within LibreOffice calc I started by making a template. This template contains seven tabs, one for each day of the week. Within each tab there are three blocks of 8 hours. Each block contains four columns. A column for the time, the performed activity, consumptions (coffee, cigarettes, etc.), and lastly any notes or remarks. At the bottom of template I placed the names of the activities I expected to do most often. I also gave them a fitting color. I prefilled 8 hours per day with sleeping 😴 (between 01:00 and 09:00). In the end it looked similar to the spreadsheet shown below:

Because I spend quite a lot of my time behind two monitors, the spreadsheet is usually opened on my secondary monitor. After a few days, filling out the spreadsheet had already become a habit which I found quite satisfying to do. After a while of diligently logging my activities, I started to notice that seeing how you spend your time in such a visual way, really did help avoid doing undesirable activities. One of the goals was to reduce the time watching YouTube, and seeing a huge red block eating away your day is definitely more confronting than only the knowledge that you watched it for a couple of hours.

Even though tracking my time this way worked great, I still felt like there was more that could be done with this data. That is why I started working on a script 👨‍💻 that automatically gives a review of the current week. I wrote a python program that imports the spreadsheet and adds up the time spend on each activity and totals the consumptions. The output can be seen in the image below:

Don't worry, you are not having a stroke, the words are in Dutch 🇳🇱. As you might be able to see, the output is formatted in Markdown. This means it could easily be converted to HTML and displayed in a prettier way. I plan to one day turn this time tracking system into a web application (which I might publish).

How to remove the label from a glass jar 🫙

In order to test some new features (such as the fancy new gradient footer) I need to write some more text here. Unfortunately, I'm suffering from a bit of writer's block. So let me just tell you about the best way I have found for removing the labels from glass jars.

First soak the label or full jar in hot water 💧. Leave them for a couple minutes, until the paper part of the label can be removed with your nails. This leaves only the sticky residue. To remove the residue, soak a sponge in some acetone (nail polish remover 💅). Rub the scrubby side of the sponge 🧽 over the residue and it should come off easily. This will leave you with a completely clean jar which can be used for other purposes.

If you are planning to store food in the jar, don't forget to clean it thoroughly with hot water and soap. Or even better, put it in an autoclave, if you have one. A dishwasher will also work.