This week on Tech Tuesdays I am delighted to present a post from a special guest author – Dr. Jeffrey Hill from the University of Cincinnati Department of Emergency Medicine.

Jeffery Hill, MD

I am a second year Education Fellow in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Cincinnati, a position accepted after having completed my residency training in Emergency Medicine at UC.  After completing my Masters of Medical Education this coming summer, I will be staying on at UC as an Assistant Residency Director, focusing on asynchronous resident and medical student education as well as my own research into asynchronous education and into cognitive biases.  You can find me tweeting most often @UCMorningReport (but also @_drjeffy) and blogging on our departmental educational blog, www.tamingthesru.com.

In my job, I wear many hats.  One day, I may be working clinically at any one of several shops.  The next day, I might be entering data for a research study, running and debriefing a simulation, developing a lecture for a medical school course, running a small group of medical students, interviewing residency applicants, filming video for an asynchronous educational module, writing a blog post or any of a number of other projects I have in the air at one time.  This makes for a satisfying, never boring, ever changing career.  But it can also make it pretty challenging to answer the question, “how much time did you spend doing x?”

Why track how much time you spend on your projects?  Well there are many reasons but the two most important in my mind are:

1.) Time is a finite and precious resource. If you are spending too much time on a project that isn’t netting you significant return, it may be time to re-evaluate how you approach that job. Having a detailed log of your time is invaluable in making these decisions.
2.) It’s good to be able to go to your boss at your annual review with hard data as to how much time your many projects are taking you. When it comes time to negotiate potential buy down, detailed time data will be valuable data for you and your boss.

Toggl is an online time-tracking software that is free to use.  Once you create an account you can start tracking your software in a number of ways.  You can enter directly through an internet browser and you can download software onto your computer(s), iPhones, iPads, and other such mobile devices.

The interface is easy to use, simply type in what you are doing and click “start.”  You can then create and assign tags and projects.  These tags and projects can then be used in the data analysis to filter the reports.

Because the service is cloud based, if you start timing on your desktop and forget to stop the timer as you step away from the computer, simply fire up the app on your mobile device and stop the timer.  Forget to stop the timer altogether (for like 8ish hours), you’ll get an email from Toggl, saying, “Hey you still working on this?”  Forget to start the timer when your working? You can easily add time back in and adjust the start and end times for your projects.

One of the strengths of the service is the ability to generate time reports.  These reports are super flexible allowing you to break your time down daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and filter by project or tag.  You can then export the report you want to a pdf as a cdv file or you can print it out.  Next time your annual review comes up with your boss or next time you get asked how much time did it take you to do ‘x’? you are only a couple of clicks away from the answer.

Check out Toggl here