jaapstronks's dashboard

Thanks; I'm looking forward to features making it possible to compare myself to people with related jobs. Because I have not been very productive these last few days, but since all of my work is being done at this computer, working for 4 hours (instead of 8) makes me more productive than almost everybody else, while in reality, I am not.

I must add, though, that the productivity measurement is biased by design. That's because the -2 to 2 scale doesn't match the nature of productivity.

Here's why: one must actively tag applications / sites and grade these tags in order to capture one's productivity. The default value of a tag is 0. But what is that, really? When I'm working, I'm using applications graded as 2. But what is 0 compared to 2? 0 is 'nothing', but it's not being idle. It's being unproductive. But what is -2, then?

In short, -2 to 2 doesn't make sense. It's a dimension too many. Watching YouTube is the same as being idle. But there shouldn't be something that's even more unproductive than being idle (or watching YouTube). That would only make sense if time could be destroyed: a score of 1 for reading a textbook to learn French, 0 for being idle, -1 for playing a mind-numbing game that makes me instantly forget the French words I just learned. But that usually doesn't happen.

So, I think tags should be graded from 0 to someting. Perhaps 0 to 1, you're working or you're not working.

But still: not everyone grades their tags. I think, many are tracking applications, or sets of websites, I suspect. It's a great system to only track how many minutes you've spent watching YouTube or using Microsoft Office applications, without the need to rank applications on the productivity scale. So, if people don't bother to actively grade their tags, their productivity is rated as being (close to) zero, making even non-productive people who bother to grade their tags (since they ARE interested in being more productive) seem more productive than they really are. Yes, that's likely: people with productivity problems use this software for tracking especially that; they are unjustly compared to other productive people who are not interested in grading their tags.

Or do you only measure people who have graded tags? Still, many of those could use the scale in unintended ways that make sense for them personally, but which unintentionally makes the aggregation of data impure. Because, if I'm at 98 with only a 4 hours of productive work, the average must be between 2 or 3, tops. If so, I don't think the aggregated productivity average holds much meaning. I wish you good luck with your efforts to make the comparison more meaningful, good to hear you're working on that!

I'm sorry, since FF3b5 didn't work (something I found out about on this forum), I went back here to see if Safari did work, according to forum users. I overlooked that your comment regarding 'issues with the most recent versions of Safari' is 6 months old. Thanks!

I'd like to phrase it more positively than Morten: implement this and I want to give you money.

ditto! And what about adding time when I'm making phonecalls or taking care of my physical bookkeeping? I like the notion of tracking without data entry, but an option to manually add data should be easy to add and would be of great value for a lot of users, and could be ignored by people who are not interested in using it.

I'd like to add that this is becoming problematic. I have Firefox 3b5 and Safari, and it appears that both browsers don't report correctly. I feel too much for reverting to FF2...

I'm with Mike.