An Investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

Benjamin Franklin

While looking for some software to audit the applications i had on my Mac came across Slie.

Now slife doesn’t audit apps it actually monitors and records the activity of applications that you use.

What makes slife so useful is that it renders the data about your application usage in a timeline representing the day, so you get an idea of which application consumed most of your time.

My expectation of the slife results for a common day would be some email and browser activity in the morning followed my some hard core TextMate activity up until lunch where email, soduko and safari would be used, come the afternoon another good block of TextMate, sprinkle a bit of NetNewsWirs across the entire day and there you go, another productive day from me

Well this is all good an well but the reality is somewhat different, the results actually show that i spend much more time in mail and safari and a hell of a let less time in TextMate, for me this is a real kick up the back side! I value my time and investing so much of it in “Surfing” or “Emailing Friends” is not a good us of my valuable time.

I now run slife all the time, and review my own activity at least on day a week.

Net result : I now spend more time “working” so i can get my task done sooner… which gives me more time to surf

The temptation is to crack on and keep going until the task is done however I can’t stress enough the importance of taking time away from this process to recharge and re-engage with the subject mater.

Some techniques for making the process less onerous (if thats possible):

Story Rotation
Often teams will follow a story list as it define by the BA, which in my opinion can lead to less informed estimates, having discussed the attributes of one story only to be presented with another similar story can often lead to dismissive estimations where in isolation the story may reveal more detail.

Take Breaks
Accept that a fresh mind is better at dealing with problems, taking a break is one of the most productive things you can do.

Give everyone a stage to express their opinion
So often the dev lead will take up most of the air space while more “junior” members of a team will sit nodding (or nodding off). Give your whole team a chance to engage in this process after all you will expect them to work in this project right?

Have Fun
Enjoy the process by making it fun! Use novel gestures for estimating or high five when you all agree, whatever it is you guys do that is fun, do it and do it more often, having a laugh will make the most onerous of tasks less so.

Estimating has to be one of the tasks i “enjoy” the least however, its value is without question.