Comment by alixanderwang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alixanderwang | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the launch! I have perhaps an unconventional feature request for this: broadcast which apps/domains my window was focused on.

To me, I feel so little additional accountability just because there's a backgrounded meeting. I scroll Twitter in large meetings already.

But if there's other people who would see a report that I was on Twitter/HN/Reddit for 10 mins of the flow session, I would not let myself do that.

> It’s harder to slack off / goof around when there is structure, community norms, and a clear leader.

People had this in an office, but I bet your monitor screen being visible to everyone around you in the office is more of a forcing function to not goof off than all of those other things combined.

The data broadcasted that I have in mind is something like what RescueTime might collect (https://twitter.com/jarredsumner/status/1426962249332125701/...). Obviously difficult to navigate privacy issues around a feature like that, but I don't think impossible (e.g. I'd trust a collector agent if it were open source).

Anyway, that's just me personally. Good luck!

FWIW this is relatively straightforward to do in Linux, at least as a quick hack. I used this for the bones of a fully automated time tracker, because I suck at counting hours.

Anyway, here are a couple of magic incantations:

    xprop -id $(xprop -root -f _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW 0x " \$0\\n" _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW | awk "{print \$2}") WM_NAME
    xprop -id $(xprop -root -f _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW 0x " \$0\\n" _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW | awk "{print \$2}") WM_CLASS

These divulge the application name and window name of your frontmost window each time they're called.

There's also the xprintidle command (may need to be installed). With these three pieces together, you can create a little background daemon that monitors what you're up to at any given moment.

A little jealous that you don't have to touch AppleScript to achieve this effect. Didn't know about xprop in Linux, so thanks for teaching me something today!

You might want to check out RescueTime's slack integration. It can sort of do what you're asking for. You can configure it to update your Slack status with whatever category of app you're spending time in.

Unless they've changed something in the last year since I used it.

https://www.rescuetime.com/integrations/slack

You'd be happy to learn that it's not so unconventional a request among Flow Club members. Everyone comes to Flow Club primarily to get work done, so people want the software to find ways to keep them even more accountable. We want to offer more "intense" experiences like that for sure.

I love this idea! I have used Flow Club a lot and this would keep me even more accountable.

I'm curious, if you are distracted and end up browsing what not, won't your tasks suffer? And won't that be noticeable in jira/other metrics?

Not the OP, but I think lot of us get distracted often. The tasks are rarely 8 hours exact, and I bet its not easy to notice that a task took say a 10% hit.

Also this post from Joel Spolsky [0]

> When I had a summer internship at Microsoft, a fellow intern told me he was actually only going into work from 12 to 5 every day. Five hours, minus lunch, and his team loved him because he still managed to get a lot more done than average. I’ve found the same thing to be true.

For me personally, the biggest issue from distractions are not these extra hours that may accumulate over time, but rather a loss of momentum.

When I feel productive I can churn tasks quickly one after the other, even the ones I "dread" -- documentations, docs, posts. OTOH when I start getting distracted its hard to be back to productive even on something I usually enjoy (coding, investigating some tricky problem).

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

Big +1 for this. Or maybe some sort of integration with RescueTime (not sure how, but why not)

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