Help me quantify extra hours, please, please, a please please.
December 1, 2014 4:54 PM Subscribe
I need help with gmail functionality. I need to figure out how many(ish) extra hours I generally work. I think an easy way to capture part of this is to check out the volume of email sent outside of my working hours. Is there a reasonably easy way to do this?
I work salaried part-time, which is generally pretty confusing and nebulous. My bosses would like to make me whole in regards to hours one way or another, but first I should provide them with a solid idea of how many extra hours a week/month whatever it takes to do my job.
Is there an easy way to get raw data from my gmail account so I can sort it out?
I work salaried part-time, which is generally pretty confusing and nebulous. My bosses would like to make me whole in regards to hours one way or another, but first I should provide them with a solid idea of how many extra hours a week/month whatever it takes to do my job.
Is there an easy way to get raw data from my gmail account so I can sort it out?
Best answer: If you do want the raw data, you can use Gmvault to download all your mail. Each message has a
posted by grouse at 5:16 PM on December 1, 2014
.meta file that contains JSON data. Messages you sent will generally have a Sent label, although it might be possible for the labels to get mixed up. The internal_date field has the date and time of the message in some timezone.posted by grouse at 5:16 PM on December 1, 2014
Best answer: My feeling (as someone who has been in this situation before as a salaried part-timer) is that an equitable way to do this, if you can count emails, is allot each email a certain amount of time and assume that some take more and some take less. Part of it does depend on the type of email you need to deal with. Is it just one email here and there to get back to someone in a timely fashion or is it sort of "clean out the inbox" type of work?
My kind was the latter and I would just use Thunderbird for my non-at-work email (you can IMAP your gmail in) and then count the sent emails that were in there. Still would love to have a great tool that did this for Thunderbird, but it was enough to make my case as in "I answered email between 12 and 12:20 on Saturday and between 2:30 and 4 on Sunday" and it would also work to say "I answered 26 emails between Friday afternoon and Monday morning" and then estimate based on that.
posted by jessamyn at 6:10 PM on December 1, 2014
My kind was the latter and I would just use Thunderbird for my non-at-work email (you can IMAP your gmail in) and then count the sent emails that were in there. Still would love to have a great tool that did this for Thunderbird, but it was enough to make my case as in "I answered email between 12 and 12:20 on Saturday and between 2:30 and 4 on Sunday" and it would also work to say "I answered 26 emails between Friday afternoon and Monday morning" and then estimate based on that.
posted by jessamyn at 6:10 PM on December 1, 2014
Late to the party here, but if you are simply tracking extra hours of work may I suggest the free time track system for computers called Toggle? Sorry, newbie here and I haven't yet mastered links ... But Google should bring it up for you. I've been using the free version for almost 2 years. A paid, more sophisticated version is also available. Both let you track individual projects by time spent. Just a thought. :)
posted by alwayson_slightlyoff at 12:40 AM on December 2, 2014
posted by alwayson_slightlyoff at 12:40 AM on December 2, 2014
Response by poster: Thanks everyone! I am having a little technical difficulty getting exactly the data I want from gmvault, but that is closest to what I want. I think using Thunderbird is a good workaround for me.
The reason Toggle won't work is that I am so crazy busy that I usually forget to log my hours so I really wanted a system that I can use a reference later, but otherwise its a good solution. Gmail meter looks promising moving forward, but not so much from May to now, which is what I need.
posted by stormygrey at 1:01 PM on December 4, 2014
The reason Toggle won't work is that I am so crazy busy that I usually forget to log my hours so I really wanted a system that I can use a reference later, but otherwise its a good solution. Gmail meter looks promising moving forward, but not so much from May to now, which is what I need.
posted by stormygrey at 1:01 PM on December 4, 2014
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by rocketbadger at 5:08 PM on December 1, 2014