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Hello world,

three weeks ago I started an experiment on an internal mailing list that I'm now moving to this public mailing list: I wrote down my current task with start and end time together with "mood points" indicating how cheerful I am while working on it.

Here's the data format, to give you an example:

mood_1_to_5,task,date,from_time,to_time 5,Read emails,2016-01-03,09:05,09:25,misc 5,Submit timesheet,2016-01-03,09:25,09:35,org 5,Backup bridge descriptor tarballs,2016-01-03,09:35,09:45,op 3,Write monthly report,2016-01-03,09:45,10:05,org 2,Handle org issue,2016-01-03,13:25,13:55,org ...

The reason was that I felt like I'm spending a lot of time on things I don't really enjoy, but I was just not sure if that was my mind tricking me. That's why I started collecting some numbers on it, because data can't lie, right? Here are some results from the third work week of 2016.

Fraction of time spent on tasks and average mood points (1 = bad, 5 = fantastic), grouped by task category, ordered by mood points:

- 4% of time, 4.0 mood points: Metrics Team - 14% of time, 3.2 mood points: Other, incl. emails and IRC - 81% of time, 3.1 mood points: Software development - 1% of time, 3.0 mood points: Organizational tasks

Top 3 tasks by mood points:

- 4% of time, 4.0 mood points: Metrics Team meeting - 2% of time, 4.0 mood points: Evaluated last week's mood - 2% of time, 4.0 mood points: Investigate Metrics performance

Bottom 3 tasks by mood points:

- 9% of time, 3.0 mood points: Metropolitan France is unused (#17786) - 5% of time, 3.0 mood points: Discussed adding CIs to hidserv graphs - 3% of time, 3.0 mood points: Problems with meek user stats

Some observations when comparing the last week to the weeks before:

I spent even more time on software development (81%) than the in the two weeks before (41% and 69%). The main reason was that I spent incredible 57% of last week on a single development task that is neither in the top 3 nor bottom 3 (57% of time, 3.1 mood points: Metrics website cleanup). I may have ignored a thing or two while doing that.

Still, more software development doesn't automatically make me more cheerful. My overall mood went down from 3.3 in the first week and 3.5 in the second week to 3.1 in week three. Maybe I should spend more time on team-related tasks. Or maybe it's the result of having to ignore non-development things while writing code.

I'm planning to continue this experiment for a while. Is there anything else that people here measure about their work that I could add? Did people write articles or books about measuring such things?

All the best, Karsten