Comment by kqr
2 years ago
I would like to see more of these tools except based on work sampling instead of trusting the user to accurately report a full account of their time.
Basically the tool I'm imagining would ping me (in the asynchronous email sense, so not actively disturb me) at random intervals with the question "what were you just doing?"
The basic problem is that self-reporting is not very reliable. I don't have the study at hand, but it is fairly noise and consistently biased in favour of some types of tasks and against others. I believe work sampling could be more accurate, but I have yet to see someone develop that tool.
A recent comment here on HN pointed me to https://timesnapper.com/. It takes screenshots across your entire workday and you can go through a video of what you were doing. Total gamechanger for me, I absolutely love it.
It also has 'Automatically popup New Flag dialog' which seems to be similar to what you want.
Huh, thanks! That looks like an easy shellscript to hack together. I might give it a shot!