Well, actually not really. What I’m doing is “similar” on a much higher level of abstraction: it is another tool to help with the “microproductivity”. (Beeminder is day-based, I needed something with higher granularity - much like you, I guess.) But instead of showing me nice graphs, my tool gives me stats about my productivity. For instance, I set up a fraction of my work-time (I don’t use that tool at home) I want to spend actually working, say 80%. Then, I can see data like “your current efficiency is 78%, and you need 8 minutes of uninterrupted work to get back to 80%”.
So, a different approach but solving a very similar problem.
As for the graphs: have you considered JavaScript and the d3 library?
Have you posted about your tool somewhere? It sounds interesting
(though I suspect that it may be highly coupled to how you work).
As for the graphs: have you considered JavaScript and the d3 library?
Yes, but given that one of my main problems is wasting too much time on
a computer, especially in a browser I deliberately avoid anything that
requires using it.
Alternative is running script that will generate html page, open it in a
headless browser and take screenshoot. It is possible but it is a bit
overcomplicated and would work really slowly.
No, thanks and probably. I will make it public one day, though (and perhaps sooner than later).
Good point. I have a browser open all the time (I need it for a lot of my work), so I have to deal with that problem in other ways. The tool I mentioned is one of them.
Usage update: it turned to be useful! Not as powerful as described by posts that inspired it, but still worth using.
There are two mechanisms that I noticed:
I have in my TODOs “run percentile script and look at result” item. Typically it results in going “oh, no results will be poor - I should do something to improve it, maybe just 5 minutes” what typically results in doing targeted beeminder task, often for more than this 5 minutes
It reminds me that maybe I did less than I wanted so far, but still my percentile is high (typically 80+). So it reminds me that while today is not as good as I want, I am still improving overall.
I often see something that is supposed to be useful, described as interesting/good idea - without any updates after initial post. And I have no idea whatever it was actually useful for the original author or is it something that turned out to not be helpful at all.
So I wanted to make an update here to avoid the same problem.
).