Category: AI

Time tracking and more random experiments

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me, since my last post. Lots of stuff going on at work, which I won’t get into, since most of it just stresses me out, and it’s Saturday, and I want to think about fun stuff.

One work-related thing that (on the one hand) is kind of stressful, but (on the other hand) gives me an excuse to mess around with some stuff I like to mess around with: time sheets. Yes, after not having to track my time for more than a decade, it looks like I’m going to have to start filling out a time sheet again. The fun part of time sheets is that it gives me an excuse to play around with Sri’s Downloadable Productivity Tools again. I used their “Emergent Task Timer” at my previous job (2010-2012), which was the last time I had to worry about tracking hours. This week, I tried experimenting with their “Emergent Task Planner” form. I printed one out on Thursday, and tried filling it out over the course of the day.

It worked out OK, but the results are kind of depressing. I started the day listing two major projects I wanted to work on. By the end of the day, I had about 30 minutes on the first, and zero time on the second. Then I had about 90 minutes on various support issues, 3 hours worth of meetings, 90 minutes I called “misc admin,” and (the one fun bit) 90 minutes for the “robot club” meeting for the Robot Assistant Field Guide. Technically, I guess I could have skipped that and done some project work, but it was the end of the day, and I was too tired to try to start on “real” work.

For Friday, I wanted to try it again, but Friday descended into chaos so fast I gave up pretty early. For next week, I bought one of these notebooks and will give it a try. I have no idea if I’ll stick with it, but it’ll be a fun thing to play with.

Tracking my time on paper has some plusses and minuses. Since I’m WFH two days and in the office three days, anything paper-based needs to get carried around. That’s not a problem with a small notebook, though I could see myself forgetting it occasionally. My other problem is that my eyesight is so bad these days that paper can be hard for me to deal with. I think the Mini ETP notebook will be fine, but we’ll see. The other dumb problem is that my desk (in the office) is so small that there’s not much room on it to keep a notebook handy. Again, though, I think I’ll be fine, but we’ll see how it works out.

I’ve also been experimenting with creating something kind of like the ETP form in OneNote, so that I can track my time there. That eliminates the various problems with a paper-based system, but it’s somehow not as fun.

I’ve always created weekly notes in OneNote, and made a bullet list for each day, with all of my meetings and all of the projects I’ve worked on. So switching to a daily note isn’t too big a stretch. But then I need to figure out if I want to keep the weekly notes too, or just have the daily notes. I always put a few lists at the end of my weekly notes, for projects I need to work on in that week, stuff I’m waiting on, stuff for next week, and so on. So if I make the daily note my main thing instead of the weekly note, do I move those lists from day to day? Or keep them on a separate weekly note?

One other option is to use daily notes each day, and then have a separate “sprint” note. Our sprints are two weeks long, so that would give me something like the weekly note, but I wouldn’t need a new one every week, just every two weeks. And it makes sense, since our work is (theoretically) supposed to be happening in sprints. But our sprints start mid-week, on Wednesdays, and I’ve never really been able to switch my brain over to thinking about time that way. To me, the standard Mon-Fri work week is still the way I think about things.

One of my problems with doing all of this in OneNote is that I can’t really automate anything there. The Copilot integration for OneNote keeps telling me that it can edit notes for me, but then it keeps failing to do that.

I’ve asked my boss to see if we can get somebody to OK me to use Work IQ CLI, which I think might allow me to do some cool stuff from the command line, though I’m pretty sure it still won’t allow me to automate much in OneNote. I’m definitely starting to think about switching from OneNote to Markdown files, at least for my daily/weekly time tracking. But of course I can’t use Obsidian at work, so that makes it a little harder to justify a Markdown-based system.

I’m not really sure when they’re going to ask us to start entering our time into a system, so I don’t need to start doing this yet, but I always feel like it’s good to get a jump on things, if I can.

On a different topic, I don’t have much to report on the Claude front. I recently switched from using a third-party Fastmail MCP to using the new official MCP. It works well, though I haven’t had a chance to do much with it yet.

I’ve gotten some good ideas out of the Robot Assistant workshops and “Robot Builder’s Club” meetings, though I haven’t actually done much with any of these big ideas. It’s a process, I guess.

I keep finding little things to do with Claude Cowork. Recently, I created an Obsidian note for the upcoming primary election, and asked Claude to add some information to it, based on what it could find on the internet. That worked OK, but then I got the idea to scan in my ballot, and asked Claude to add more information based on that. And that got me a much more complete note. So that was cool.

Well, this post has gotten a bit scattershot, so maybe I should tie things up. Saturday is about half done, but I’ve got all of my chores done, and I think I can spend the rest of the day goofing off.

Claude and Kobo

It’s a quiet rainy Sunday, and I’m pretty tired, so I thought now would be a good time to write up a little blog post.

The first thing on my mind: more experimenting with Claude Cowork. My most recent mini-project was to see if I could hook Claude up to my email. Claude has a built-in connector for Gmail, but of course that’s not what I use. I use Fastmail. I spent a fair bit of time looking at various MCP options. In in end, I went with this one. There are a few ways to get it working, but I went with the simplest one (I think): adding it into Claude Desktop as a Claude Desktop Extension (DXT). That worked well.

I haven’t really done much with it yet. I have a few ideas though. I keep coming back to the idea of some kind of “daily briefing” out of Claude, combining info from my Obsidian vault (tasks), email (newsletters), and news pulled from the web. But I haven’t really gotten far with that.

I just tried this prompt: “Please look at the Receipts folder in my email and find all emails from Kobo. Then make me a list of all the books I’ve bought from Kobo, including title, author, and purchase date. Also, indicate which ones are audiobooks.”

That took a while, but worked pretty well. If I didn’t already have a list of all those books in Obsidian, I could have dumped it into there. I do note that the search took longer than I think it should have; it may be that the MCP I’m using isn’t terribly efficient? Or Claude isn’t using it efficiently? I don’t know.

One thing I’m noticing in my efforts to find good use cases for Claude Cowork: A lot of the stuff that would qualify as “quick wins” doesn’t really help me, because it’s all about information organization, and I’m already really fussy about that stuff. I started watching a video the other day showing how Claude Cowork could sort out a folder full of random documents. The example input folder was full of files named “document.pdf” and “document (2).pdf” and “attachment (3).pdf”. Useless file names, basically. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I had a folder like that! My bank statements for the last ten years are all stored in folders by year and consistently named like “statement-yyyy-mm-dd.pdf”. Same with credit card statements, phone bills, and so on. So Claude can’t help me there!

Another semi-useful thing  I did recently was to pull the annotations from a a book I just finished on my Kobo and reformat them into a nice Markdown file and save it into Obsidian. I use the annotations plugin for Calibre to pull annotations from Kobo books. For Kobo books purchased from the Kobo store, you can export annotations from your account, but for EPUBs that you load yourself, there’s no supported way to pull them. For those, the annotations plugin works, but it’s far from perfect. The annotations show in the book’s metadata in Calibre. They’re in an HTML format, and they’re shown in semi-random order. So that’s frustrating. Claude managed to convert the HTML into clean Markdown, and sort the annotations back into proper order. So I think I’ll be doing that again.

I’ve thought about turning that into a skill, so I can keep using it and get consistent results, but I asked Claude if I should, and it said not to bother. So we’ll see how it works next time. If I see any inconsistency or I can think of stuff I want to tweak with it, I’ll give the skill thing another thought.

So that’s it for random Claude stuff for today. I had to work late on Friday, then all day Saturday, on a server virtualization project, so I should really just be relaxing today and not thinking about computers.

Happy Easter, still messing with Claude, and some work overwhelm

It’s a quiet Sunday here in Somerville, and hopefully, it’ll stay that way. It’s drizzling a bit, so that helps.

I had a pretty stressful week at work, mostly around fixing a critical issue with TLS 1.2 and SMTP email. (To be clear, I did not create this problem. I’m just the idiot who volunteered to solve it.) There was also stress around trying to help out on a few support tickets, and around a couple of my own support tickets that no one seems to be able to solve. I had some after-hours work Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and a little morning work on Saturday. (Not a lot of work, to be honest, but enough that I couldn’t just “unplug” at the end of the day, which can be a problem.)

So today (Sunday) is the first day this week where I haven’t had to turn on my work laptop at all, or think about work. Of course, this hasn’t stopped me from thinking about work, and I will admit that I just sent myself an email to remind myself to check some stuff tomorrow morning.

My other area of work stress this week is that everyone else in my group has been making progress with Palantir Foundry, while I just haven’t had enough time to do anything with it, aside from the very basic “speed run” training. And there seems to be a lot of management enthusiasm around that product, so I’m worried about seeming out of touch or lagging behind. And it doesn’t help that Palantir is a, shall we say, problematic company: Our product is used, on occassion, to kill people.
See also: Palantir Controversies: A Deep Dive into Privacy, Surveillance, and Ethical Concerns.
But anyway, it’s really great software and I should definitely learn it! 😵

What I’ve been trying to do in my spare time (🤣) is to continue learning Claude. To that end, I bought David Sparks’ Robot Assistant Field Guide this week, and started working on it. I can’t really make use of a lot of the stuff he does there, since our setups and use cases are fairly different. But I’m getting some ideas from it, and trying out a few things.

One idea I’m starting to like: using my Obsidian vault as a kind of “home base” for Claude Cowork. I added a fairly simple CLAUDE.md to the vault recently, and I have some ideas for skills I can add, and stuff I can do, with it.

First up will be adding Kepano’s Obsidian skills, I think. That seems like a pretty straightforward thing to do. (Of course, I’m trying to do it now, and hitting some issues, but I’m sure I’ll get it right eventually.)

I’m stumbling through stuff I can do with various plugins, MCPs, experimental features, and so on. There’s a lot of stuff that’s almost there, but not quite. Or it’s there, but not in the way I want it to be. For instance, it would be useful if Claude could control Firefox. There’s a Claude in Chrome extension, but no equivalent Firefox extension. I’ve found that the Chrome extension works in Microsoft Edge, and I have Edge, of course, so I enabled it there and tried it out. Short version: it works, but it doesn’t work on every site, and it doesn’t always work right, so I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort at this point.

And it would be great if Claude could read and write to my Fastmail account. (I have some ideas about using it to help me clean up and manage my email.) So Claude has GMail integration, but no generic IMAP/JMAP integration or specific Fastmail integration. There’s more than one third-party Fastmail MCP project, so I could try one of those, but I don’t have the time to do that right now.

Similarly, it would be useful if Claude could plug in to my iCloud contacts and calendar, but that’s not easy either. I did set up a BusyCal integration on my Mac, and that’s cool, but of course it only works on my Mac and not my PC (or my iPhone or iPad).

So, at this point, I need to zero in on one or two things to concentrate on, and make some progress on. Right now, I should probably sign off and relax. The Phillies game is about to start. ⚾