It brings to mind what I do when I am having problems with my focus. I keep something like a "ship's log" of my time. I just note the time of day when I start doing something and then the time when my concentration breaks. Next to it I write what I was doing. Now I have a record of what I did, something like
1543-1555 fooled around on Hacker News
1555-1602 bathroom
1602-1619 worked on presentation
1620-1643 worked on presentation
I think when we wear many hats we're susceptible to unproductive states of mind, and this little hack helps me a lot.
But I don't think it would be a good idea for public display. Depending on the boss, maybe it would be ok if s/he looked at it, but I dunno. I've never had a boss I didn't completely trust, but I think I'm pretty lucky that way.
Maybe snippets would work if they were just between a manager and his or her reports.
It's a pretty basic strategy - if everyone else is fluffing up their reports, you sure don't want to be the one who isn't.
Occasionally I will run it for a day, or even up to a week, check the breakdown, and pick goals to improve on, run it another week etc.
Running it all the time is too time consuming in itself, but occasional "checkpoints" help ensuring I maintain good habits etc.
Would never show it to my boss though - I feel confidentiality for those kinds of things are necessary to ensure you're absolutely honest with yourself. I'd happily recommend people working for me do the same, including withholding it from me.
Automates it all and self-games so you can set your own targets to beat.
The best part is that you actually think twice about going to that non-productive site because you know it's going to be staring back at you at the end of week report. Of course it takes discipline but sometimes little tools help.
I'm dabbling with quantified self strategies. I want to cover everything.
Health (BP, glucose, etc), food, pills, github commits, potty breaks, phone/chat/email, exercise, and most importantly sleep.
I want the data collection done passively (I will never journal).
I even want the total self app to periodically ask me what my mental state is. "Are you happy?" "Do you have a head ache?" "How does your tummy feel?"
I find it very useful for stuff like reminding myself what I was working on yesterday, last week, etc, what I was doing on it and why, and that sort of thing. Being able to search for class names, bug IDs, and changeset IDs is pretty handy too for getting more insight into why I did something, even if it was a while ago. I think it helps keep me more productive too, since I don't want to have to look back on what I did yesterday and only see a couple of sentences.
At another customer's there was a time reporting software. But instead of reporting real time, we were instructed to report normalized times over an 8-hour work day.
That's to say if you do it personally for the purpose of self-improvement, it's fine, when there's a social aspect of trying to determine who is pulling their weight it's going to more dishonest.
Exactly. If hundreds of thousands of salary and tens of thousands of bonus dollars are tied to it, there is no doubt judging, gaming and justifying will be going on.
I see it as a pretty common thing to do though... either on annual basis (as a performance review) or a daily one (as a standup). Granted the theory of the standup is nothing to do with measuring productivity, but it gets noticed.