Is it possible to get a report by time of day?
I wanted to see what are my most efficient time in the day. So having a report showing number of entries for each time of day (ideally billable and total) and seing when I tend to work the most.
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I also love analyzing data by time of day. One of the difficulties of analyzing time entries by time of day, is that the time entries don’t inherently represent any kind of “efficiency.” 20 entries in an hour could just mean that I switched tasks frequently, and it doesn’t say anything about how hard/difficult the time was that I spent. In order to track efficiency, you would need to measure some kind of output, which isn’t necessarily included in time logs.
However, I still think it’s useful to have reports by time of day. For example, it would be interested to aggregate data from the entire month and see what I am typically working on in the mornings compared to the afternoons.
If I put myself in the shoes of Toggl, and try to figure out what this would look like, it could be a relatively complex issue:
Technically, it would present some challenges about time entries that span periods of the day (start in the morning, and end in the afternoon). If you’ve noticed, entries that span midnight are counted entirely on the day the entry started (even if the bulk of the time is in the following day). This is typically an acceptable behavior for midnight, but would be more obviously an issue when there are multiple periods in the day.
Additionally, there is the problem of dividing the periods of the day:
- Is it two periods (AM/PM)?
- Is it three periods (morning, afternoon, evening)?
- Is it more than three periods (morning, midmorning, lunch, afternoon, evening)?
- When does lunch start? Is it 11am, noon, or 1pm?
While Toggl may eventually choose to take on this complexity, I think this is a great usecase for the “Export to Excel” or “Export to CSV” buttons which give you all the data and let you analyze it yourself in interesting ways.
I tried to do it in Excel.
I counted the number of unique days tracked during the time period (as you said all tasks are not equals, I just wanted to know if I did track during the time interval) and showed this on a graph.
For entries that span periods, I count them on the whole period. For example a time entry starting at 9 and ending at 10 will show as worked at 9, 9h10, 9h20, 9h30, 9h40 and 9h50 (as I split in 10 minutes intervals)
