Timestamping all the things

Question

What is the value of timestamping all the things?

Answer

Adding a temporal reference to everything allows us to contextualize this information. It allows us to better remember the exact moment we took a note, which may in turn help us remember why we took that note.

Timestamping also allows us to have a better idea of how things have come into being sequentially. If you have notes you wrote in different locations and they all have their timestamp, you can gather them and organize them by their timestamp.

Having a creation timestamp on tasks is useful to track how long a task has been opened. It's also useful to determine the recency of a task, as recent tasks generally have more urgency than older tasks, as proven by the fact that the task has aged and is not completed. Having a timestamp on the last modification date allows us to know when it was last updated, giving us a sign this task has been seen and hasn't been discarded yet. Having a completion timestamp allows us to measure how long it takes for tasks to go from creation to completion. Having timestamps on all the events related to the task allows us to know how many task management tasks are necessary for a task to be completed.

Timestamping is useful to predict events. If you have a system (e.g., a store, a computer, a company) and you do a lot of different actions, being able to forecast when is the next time a specific event will occur is useful. It also allows you to forecast events volume (e.g., number of sales, number of actions per employee)

Note: This question was timestamped 2018-04-21 22:14:52.