I'm speaking at TDC 2019

In my talk at 14:10 South Center Career Track, Career Tips from Someone Who Knows a Lot of Rockstar Programmers, I will share some of the lessons I learned from the people I interviewed for the Secrets of the Rockstar Programmers book, and also include some tips of my own. Though I don’t claim to be a rockstar programmer myself (or the newer term: “10x programmer”), I can honestly say I know plenty of people that who are.

I have been extremely blessed to have been a full time telecommuter since 2002, first for Sun, and now for Oracle. Working in this way presents some unique challenges, and over the years I have developed some techniques to maintain productivity and forward career momentum, preserving the personal benefits of telecommuting while continuing to give the company value for their money. Perhaps I can do another post on the broader topic of telecommuting tips, but this post is about one practical technique that applies to telecommuters and office workers alike: keeping a personal timesheet.

Here’s the basic idea.

  1. Have a spreadsheet that is set up as a timesheet.

  2. Each time a new month comes around, save the previous month as the current month.

  3. Keep track of all of the time you spend working and a couple words about what you did.

I’ve been doing this since I started telecommuting in 2002, so I have seventeen years of monthly spreadsheets. Here is a sample spreadsheet you can download and customize: 2023MM-timesheet.xlsx.

Update: 2023-08-07: My employer switched to discretionary time off (DTO). I personally believe DTO benefits employers more than employees. I’m not alone in this belief. See Why unlimited time off is often better for employers than employees and Unlimited Paid Time Off: A Good or Bad Idea?. I added a simple DTO tracking facility to the spreadsheet.

Like my previous post about status reports, this seems mundane and annoying, but over time, it adds up to a valuable searchable resource.