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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It's a work sampling timer. When it goes off, you record what you were doing.[1][2] After a few days or weeks, a pattern of how much time is spent doing what appears. It's a management idea that never really caught on, because it's so annoying. Probably saleable as an app today, with a cloud-hosted back end.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC225293/pdf/mlab...

[2] https://www.hca.wa.gov/assets/billers-and-providers/particip...

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> Probably saleable as an app today, with a cloud-hosted back end.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bereal-photos-friends-daily/id...

But a corporate version!

Oh I built one of those with Rust and FLTK: https://six-five-six-four.com/git/reactor/annoying_journal

I figured if it works for software profiling it oughta work for people. And I set the interval to some Golden Ratio thing like 37 minutes, with the hopes that it wouldn't log the same times every day, but also wouldn't be purely random.

Wait, so how well did it work?

I don't remember any big insights except that I'm pretty bad at estimates.

Everything that feels like a "half-day" task took an entire day or two. I would look back on every feature and think, "No way was I working on that for X days straight?"

Basically nothing takes less than half a day.

I’m going to claim that lesson alone made it a success

Small wins are still wins

I wondered if you could use a Geiger counter with background radiation to do the same thing, but it'd probably be thrown off by moving between different rooms.

Yes you can it is a type of quantum random number generator. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generat...

The biggest drawback is non uniform distribution and low bit rates. Another was radiation concerns.

I think you’d need a very insensitive Geiger counter. Mine is relatively cheap (GQ GMC320) and still clicks 30 times per minute as background radiation.

You could put it inside a box maybe.

Make sure you note down what you're doing each time the cat dies and hand the report to your supervisor at the end of each week

Similar to Reporter:

http://reporter-app.com/

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