Guy Cousineau's dashboard

I like the prompt after returnign form idle mode. It may sound liekbig brother to say what were you doing for the past xx minutes but it is a good way to allow me to capture 99% of my 9-to-5 day.

It might be a way to remind me to take ONLY 15 minutes for a coffee break ;-)

Caution: some may need to to split up the idle time into 2-3 components e.g. meeting followed by lunch or 15 minute cofee break followed by 20 miutes work planning meeting (at the coffee table).

If idle time is currently 2 mintes, would I want to be promted every time i have a 2 minute phone call? 2 minutes of idle time LOST but 10 minutes earns a prompt sound slike a good compromise.

I also recall a time management/couting training session where we learned that interruptions got charged to what you were doing before the interruption - in the long run it averages out. In that respect I would favour setting idle time to 5 minutes and charging that 5 minutes to what I was doing 5 minutes ago. This may be inconvenient for those who may want to use RT for customer billing.

Guy

aha! my email is back on the slice list. I only have 3 apps tagged for email but that is where I spend most of my time. I only have about 10 tags total so I can't comment on the list-length of slice options.

I have resisted until now. Here is my 2 cents worth.

The more manual intervention the more you increase the likelyhood of skewing the data.

Kwirk said 5 months ago that we need more than 2 minutes to idle becasue "i spend too much time talking tomy co-workers". Is that a good thing or a bad thing. Sometimes I brainstorm with a co-worker and that is productive but other times we're talking sports or politics.

If you lengthen the timeout I can take a stroll or a chat knowing the last app is recording my inactivity.

If you ask me if I was productive when i resume I will always say "of course I was!"

With extended phone calls, co-workers, sidewalk business (you know that other employee who sits onthe corner of your desk for what seems like forever) and other interruptions I would have to answer "what were you doing" dozens of times per day and would give up on the app.

I'd rather keep it simple and low maintenance.

I personally maintain that I do 90% of my work on the computer. If that is true, then I should expect to capture only 90% of my workday on the computer. If my work is 100% computer driven then any time I am not typing or mousing is unproductive time.

Ryan said a couple of days ago that waiting for a CPU-hog script to run should probably be counted as productive (though idle). yeah just keep shaking the mouse while the script grinds away does not seem like the right answer. The only similar activity I do is periodically unarchive a chunk of Outlook mail. While this ties up Outlook, I can still do other stuff so I use another APP while I am waiting. But if the APP is using 90% of CPU time I might as well leave the room. . . can we detect idle and tap into task manager to detect if an app other than "system idle" is using a big chunk of CPU time?

Finally, I would like to be able to log large chunks of time like meetings and training. Tapping into Outlook and other calendars may have some merit.

ok Fernando so you are on a mission to find out what you were doing at 4pm. I am now looking at my dashboard for yesterday and I want to know what I was doing from 2-3 because I know what i was doing at 4: I was going home :-)

I have 54 min at 55 seconds but I don't know where they came from. Perhaps this is a wish list item.

However, closer to your question I look at NEWS as one of my time wasters. So I click on the NEWS bar in my top 10 APPS list Yesterday I spent 11 minutes in the 8 'oclock hour and 2 minutes in the 9 o'clock hour. But that is still not good enough. I want to know exactly what I was doing inthe 8 o'clock hour.

When I look at the list of apps/sites below this new graph I can see how many minutes I spent on each but I don't know at what time. e.g. I know I spent 3 minutes on news.google.ca but in which hour?...click on the app name and I find out that the 3 minutes was all spent inthe 8 o'clock hour. I can move on down the list until I account for all my NEWS time. . . or which ones I used during the 8 o'clock hour.

I gather from your post that you have tagged as "discretionary" some of your time wasters and you wonder which one of those you used in the 4 o'clock hour. What I described may be tedious if you ahve a dozen discretionary apps but it WILL give you the answer.

Filters and autotaggignmay help. I have seen many times DON'T TAG EVERYTHING

Here is how I do it. This is a good job for Fiday Afternoon.

I go to the list of untagged apps/sites and ask for weekly view. Then I pick a number like 10 minutes. Anything that I spent more than 10 minutes this week should "probably" be counted". Then I spend a few seconds tagging those.

Then I go to monthly view and pick another time period like say 20 minutes: i.e. anything more than 20 minutes per month should probbaly be counted...tag those.

Then I go bak and check the size of my untagged for the week and month. If I am happy with the unmeasured ratio I move on.

Once you get used to this process, you can probbaly spend 5 minutes a week or less doing maintenance.

Those who use RT for billing and other dailya ctivities may need a different approach.

Guy

your 10 most used apps are on the dashboard automatically and you can click on APP/SITE list button in top right to get the full list. So I am not sure waht you are asking.

However, if you specifically want to track SPIDER, then set a goal: no more than 1 hour of spider per day . Then you will always see your progress just below efficiency on the dashboard . . . I do that with NEWS. I get caught up reading news sites and forget to get back to work ;-)

Guy

Guy

hmmm
Why woudl you want to knwo where you wasted your time at 4pm?

I'd like to knwo where I wasted my time ALL DAY :-)

You could always read your log files . . . not as pretty as the dashboard but it works when you want to know exactly when you did something.

Guy

I like this idea but I wonder if it shoudl run sort of in reverse. i visit 50-100 websites per day and most is for legitimate research. For example, I do media tracking in 3 subject areas. This literally takes me to dozens of news-type sites every day. While I tend to ignore those - a few seconds to a minute each, there are some that i revisit regularly like cnn, consumerist, canada.com, cbc.ca, etc. Periodically, I look at my UNTAGGED for the month and add those news sites where I spent a material amount of time.

If I understood correctly, now I would have to whitelist them also to have them recorded and tagged to NEWS activity.

On the other hand if the whitelist becomes a list of where I do NOT want to be tracked, I can just enter snapfish, facebook, youtube and consider everything else trackable - then I still wind up with dozens of untagged but recodrded items of 20 seocnds that still do not lump together.

If I visit a website for 30 seconds every day it becomes significant in the monthly total.

There is no easy answer but here is a middle of the road idea

place any website less than a minute into a GENERAL WEB, unless it has a tag. Periodically, we can go through the GENERAL WEB list (maybe available from the APP-SITE list) and tag those that shoudl be recorded.

I wonder if we shoudl concentrate on the FILE we are working on - that would be a lot of tagging. Perhaps the FOLDER would be better. Excel and Word seem to recport the WINDOW title or perhaps it is the file name but not the path.

so if I work on
c:/guy/project1/fiel1.doc
and
c:/guy/project1/file64.xls

both acitivites could be tagges for project 1.

but can we figure out this is WORD editing an OUTLOOK message?

<attribute name="app_name" type="string">WINWORD</attribute>
<attribute name="os_username" type="string">AAFC-AAC\cousineaug</attribute>
<attribute name="window_title" type="string">RE: My duties - Message - Microsoft Word</attribute>

oooooops cannot paste URI unto the mesage window
so I started with date&day=7

Yes I know "the rest" has been there from the beginning and now that it is visual, id did catch my eye.

I am aware fo the 2-minute thing and I do not micromanage - 2 minutes is good. What I was referring to was the time between "end of record x" and "start fo record x+1". Sometimes there are a few seonds or even minutes when we are idle 2 minutes and I wonder if any of those get included accieentally in the totals.

Can you grab my first log file upload from Friday AM and rebuild it to a graph?

I'll try to rememebr to get an early day screenshot monday and I'll forward by email.

Windows XP IE 6.0.2900