In the one bit of quantified self (remember when that was hot?) that I've kept up for any length of time, I subscribed to RescueTime in late 2008, just 1.5 years into my Tableau tenure. For the next decade I left it running, tracking my activity on my development desktop at work. I'd also click a "type of offline time" button when returning to that machine after intra-day absences of 10+ minutes. It wasn't a perfect system, but I'd say it picked up about 90-95% of my work time on average (where 100% does not include breaks, non-working lunches, or commute).

The graph above comes from that data, charting hours worked on a monthly basis. The only notable missing data is the week almost every year where I'd fly out to TC in October or November, that and for some months after the "DPP" mark I'd sometimes work away from my desk the whole day.

Paternity leaves are easy to spot. Insiders will recognize the Kraken release codename - I think we even used it in some public marketing. E6 was a personal hustle for me, driving our transition from yearly releases to a quarterly SDLC. One Branch was the culmination of something I wrote up for the engineering blog.

It's interesting to see an increasing and then decreasing slope. 2015 was when I stepped off of the conventional tracks (IC developer, then management) into the practices/process/human-systems space. I think that was when I got a work laptop, and it was also certainly a transition into more a meeting-oriented work style.

The spot labeled "crash" is featured in this piece, obliquely. I'll certainly write more about it later, but that point came after burnout and stress, and before some vacation, personal transformation, and the freedom I described in that post.

Anyway, hello to my old colleagues, hope this was interesting. You might be able to spot a few more releases or events that we shared. Lots of stories there.