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Comment by bucket2015 | Hacker News Reader

bucket2015

Creator here - surprisingly, it's less annoying than you'd think, (at least for me).

I built this mostly from the point of view of personal productivity/improvement.

The idea is that it will keep asking you what you're doing even when you don't feel like putting an effort into tracking your time that day. Even when you didn't sleep enough or feel lazy, it'll still keep asking you, collecting the stats, and reminding you that it's watching.

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What would be awesome is to include an option for random time, stochastically centered around a certain length, since that is perfect for not being able to game the system. I know that a tool called "Beeminder" had something like this back in the day.

Found the blog post they did back then: http://messymatters.com/tagtime/

I used this for a while and it really was extremely helpful since it activated the "gamey" part of my brain.

This. TagTime (which is Free, made by the Beeminder people, and plays nicely with their goal tracking product if you want it) is scheduled such that you are equally likely to be 'pinged' at any moment as any other, with an expected value of every 45 minutes.

I have been using it for the past five years or so. Apart from being a gloriously hacky bundle of perl scripts (and not playing wonderfully well when run on multiple machines) I've found it perfect. There's also an Android version nowadays I think, though.

That blog link explains it well.

I especially like this obscure bug in the RNG algorithm they're using, which is referenced in their Github README (https://github.com/tagtime/TagTime): http://github.com/dreeves/TagTime/issues/62#issuecomment-239...

It would be awesome if the notification says, "Are you still doing X" when I have already told I am doing X. Saves me a few keystrokes.

Okay, my bad. You have handled it in a drop down. I wonder if the notification can have the last item to save a click.

I'm being picky because I do plan to use this daily. But I am already happy. Kudos to you dev. =))

I like the idea a lot, because i have memory problems and tend to get distracted very easily, which causes me to often forget what i was doing. So a constant reminder is very helpful.

Please don't make an enterprise version. Fun for the individual, maybe not so fun if forced upon you by megacorp!

Cool build though!

Yeah, absolutely no enterprise version. If my manager asks me to use this, I'll start updating my resume.

I worked (briefly) at a place that requested updates in 15 min intervals... on a spreadsheet. No thanks!

I briefly worked for a law firm and had to track my time in 6 minute increments.

Could you work on one thing for an hour then back-fill the timesheet to reflect that?

Yes, of course, but it became quite difficult to track when there was fire fighting across several fires

"What have you been doing in the last 15 minutes?" - "I've been trying to get back into the task I was working on after my concentration was broken because I needed to update this time tracker"

Nail on the head

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