<story><title>Ask HN: How to keep yourself accountable?</title><text>Hi HN,&lt;p&gt;lately I realized I&amp;#x27;m struggeling to keep myself accountable, mainly for work I am the main stakeholder in.&lt;p&gt;When working &amp;quot;after spec&amp;quot; or together with someone else on the same code, I can to stick to it and deliver quality I&amp;#x27;m satisfied with.
But as soon as I work for myself my standards, quality and even goals start going down hill. Short term I&amp;#x27;m okay with less and sloppy work, and after a while I regrett no doing a better job.&lt;p&gt;Do you guys have ideas, techniques etc. to deal with this behaviour?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>fceruti</author><text>What tools do you use for time&amp;#x2F;project tracking?</text></item><item><author>neuland</author><text>I work remotely and have recently taken on a bunch of responsibility with two non-profit orgs. And I&amp;#x27;ve found my time getting crunched between everything. So, I&amp;#x27;ve started detailed time tracking to make sure that I don&amp;#x27;t slip on work hours, especially since it&amp;#x27;s not 9-5.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t submit it to anyone, it&amp;#x27;s just for myself. And, it turned out that I wasn&amp;#x27;t slipping at all. But, the peace of mind of being able to prove it to myself was good. A nice side effect is seeing which projects or types of activities take up my time.&lt;p&gt;Other accountability things I&amp;#x27;ve been doing lately is writing more comments, documentation, and focusing on writing code that is easy for others to jump into (well structured modules, one-click dev setup, automated deploys, etc). That is, even on projects for myself or where I&amp;#x27;m likely to be the only person ever to touch it. It is good practice to get into and it does help a lot when you&amp;#x27;re coming back to something after 6 months.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>l0b0</author><text>I use Time Keeping Sucks (TKS), because it&amp;#x27;s a great little command line tool[0], Vim format, web UI[1] and more written by some very talented colleagues and lots of people (myself included) use it daily at work. It&amp;#x27;s built to interface with the time tracking system at work, but could probably easily be generalized to work with any similar API.&lt;p&gt;(You might find my Python stub[2] if you search for the name. It&amp;#x27;s really just a development setup based on other work, to maybe use the ideas from the original Perl implementation and hopefully involve a wider community.)&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;debian.catalyst.net.nz&amp;#x2F;catalyst&amp;#x2F;dists&amp;#x2F;stable&amp;#x2F;catalyst&amp;#x2F;binary-amd64&amp;#x2F;tks_1.0.32_all.deb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;debian.catalyst.net.nz&amp;#x2F;catalyst&amp;#x2F;dists&amp;#x2F;stable&amp;#x2F;catalys...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;grantm&amp;#x2F;tksweb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;grantm&amp;#x2F;tksweb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gitlab.com&amp;#x2F;victor-engmark&amp;#x2F;tks&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gitlab.com&amp;#x2F;victor-engmark&amp;#x2F;tks&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: How to keep yourself accountable?</title><text>Hi HN,&lt;p&gt;lately I realized I&amp;#x27;m struggeling to keep myself accountable, mainly for work I am the main stakeholder in.&lt;p&gt;When working &amp;quot;after spec&amp;quot; or together with someone else on the same code, I can to stick to it and deliver quality I&amp;#x27;m satisfied with.
But as soon as I work for myself my standards, quality and even goals start going down hill. Short term I&amp;#x27;m okay with less and sloppy work, and after a while I regrett no doing a better job.&lt;p&gt;Do you guys have ideas, techniques etc. to deal with this behaviour?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>fceruti</author><text>What tools do you use for time&amp;#x2F;project tracking?</text></item><item><author>neuland</author><text>I work remotely and have recently taken on a bunch of responsibility with two non-profit orgs. And I&amp;#x27;ve found my time getting crunched between everything. So, I&amp;#x27;ve started detailed time tracking to make sure that I don&amp;#x27;t slip on work hours, especially since it&amp;#x27;s not 9-5.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t submit it to anyone, it&amp;#x27;s just for myself. And, it turned out that I wasn&amp;#x27;t slipping at all. But, the peace of mind of being able to prove it to myself was good. A nice side effect is seeing which projects or types of activities take up my time.&lt;p&gt;Other accountability things I&amp;#x27;ve been doing lately is writing more comments, documentation, and focusing on writing code that is easy for others to jump into (well structured modules, one-click dev setup, automated deploys, etc). That is, even on projects for myself or where I&amp;#x27;m likely to be the only person ever to touch it. It is good practice to get into and it does help a lot when you&amp;#x27;re coming back to something after 6 months.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>leetrout</author><text>I am a fan of rescuetime.com&lt;p&gt;I set up separate accounts on my machine for personal, work, sideprojects and log in to those accounts when I am working or when I want to veg out and play minecraft. Couple this with an invasive tracker like rescuetime and I can have HN and reddit blocked on my work-related user accounts.</text></comment>