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Discussion on: Git Workflow: Should the history of commits show the real time of your work?

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daniel13rady profile image
Daniel Brady • Edited

Now, all of that said, I love the idea from a personal productivity and effectiveness angle 😍 I've thought many thoughts about ways to encode more of the human factor into commits for later analysis. It's really fascinating and also poses terrific challenges!

There's a difference between real-time work tracking for a project, and for a person. And there's a problem with how to define "work" in both cases: how do you capture/represent the effort that went into every commit? This includes rewriting, testing, debugging, begging the tiny gods of StackOverflow for help, going for a walk to think through a problem, ....

And how do you also factor out time spent distracted? Or do you include that metric as well?


Personally, if we could come up with a clear definition of capturing "real-time work" into a timestamp, I would use it to simply get a better idea of how long it took me to do a task vs. how long it felt, which I'm sure I could use in a number of ways. But I wouldn't obsess over the exact values given how much my mileage varies by circumstances πŸ˜„ Nor would I consider it useful from a code history perspective.

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daveskull81 profile image
dAVE Inden

Thanks so much for the thoughtful response. I love this. I agree that from the often used features of git the timestamps will change frequently. Like most things with working on a team a workflow would need to be agreed upon so that any kind of baseline could be established.
I also really like taking a step back to look at it from a couple of angles. Personal or individual productivity measuring is super hard and there is so much that is difficult or impossible to measure in any meaningful way. The process of measuring often is so much work in itself it takes away, or at least feels like it does, from one being productive.
This is a great example of the many ways work can be measured and the importance of a team of people agreeing on how that measuring is done and what is measured when determining how to be effective at their work.