Three years ago, I spent four months in my Sicilian grandmother’s home town editing a book I had begun to hate. Time cues were sparse: church bells four times an hour, a nearby friend who dropped in for coffee once a day, and cannoli once a week. I could easily come to the end of a week without having made a single edit. So I built myself a timekeeper in FileMaker Pro.
At first, the dismal results came in every day: When I felt that I had put in a good five or six hours of steady work, the end-of-day tally—with all the breaks for email, meals, snacks, and quick walks—usually amounted to about two hours of actual work.… Read the rest “BI for the lone wolf”