One year into being a post-doc I started to log my work activities. The original motivation was to create an overview about what it means to work as a post-doc developing computational cognitive models. About 7 years later and with my time as post-doc coming to an end in 2018 I slowly try to make sense of the data. This is work in progress. Stay tuned!
For my day to day work the most useful feature of the log so far has been to get an overview of what I have worked on in the recent past. Question: Why am I not further in what I wanted to do? What have I actually done last week? Where did the time go to? The log allows me to check this. Here’s an interactive plot of projects that I worked on and activities that this included for one exemplary week. Click on one of the project pieces of the pie to see the associated distribution of activities:
I wrote the activity logger myself. It’s a Python project using sqlite as database and an efficient command line interface allowing to log jobs by typing something like “coding for BeeMEG”, or “meeting with Dimitrije and Dario for BIworkshop”. The code is available on github.