I was reading it and thinking that I was like that. I used to think "meh, measuring work in hours". It felt especially disgusting when your employer did it. But then I discovered a tiny widget called "Timer" and it really made me think carefully of how I waste my time and helped me to keep track of my productivity. You just sit, start the timer and get to work, no excuses. My impression now is that it would actually be useful, not harmful, to track employees time carefully - and use it not as a final judgement, but rather as another source of data for analyzing efficiency.
After I read this article I started thinking about effectively tracking time. I realized the best approach would be to do it seamlessly, so that I wouldn't have to actually start/stop the timer and write down task names. And so I googled this app which seems to be doing exactly this (for the teams too): http://app.chrometa.com I think it would probably show a very interesting data, especially in a team of developers, which would lead to some adjustments in how people work. Too bad I'm on Ubuntu 90% of my time now, I'd probably try it.
What you're saying is true if 'wasting time' was actually a problem. How often, though, in the course of reading a random news post or checking Twitter for the 478th time that day, do you realize the reason your program segfaults, or figure out to solution to making your application more modular and flexible?
While not an ideal use of your time, developers rarely stop thinking about the problems they're working on.
Now excuse me, I think I have an idea I need to go try out! ;)
I agree, that's why I suggest to not use time tracking as a final metric. I argue though, that such stats would show some interesting and not very obvious tendencies.
Comments
I was reading it and thinking that I was like that. I used to think "meh, measuring work in hours". It felt especially disgusting when your employer did it. But then I discovered a tiny widget called "Timer" and it really made me think carefully of how I waste my time and helped me to keep track of my productivity. You just sit, start the timer and get to work, no excuses. My impression now is that it would actually be useful, not harmful, to track employees time carefully - and use it not as a final judgement, but rather as another source of data for analyzing efficiency.
After I read this article I started thinking about effectively tracking time. I realized the best approach would be to do it seamlessly, so that I wouldn't have to actually start/stop the timer and write down task names. And so I googled this app which seems to be doing exactly this (for the teams too): http://app.chrometa.com I think it would probably show a very interesting data, especially in a team of developers, which would lead to some adjustments in how people work. Too bad I'm on Ubuntu 90% of my time now, I'd probably try it.
What you're saying is true if 'wasting time' was actually a problem. How often, though, in the course of reading a random news post or checking Twitter for the 478th time that day, do you realize the reason your program segfaults, or figure out to solution to making your application more modular and flexible?
While not an ideal use of your time, developers rarely stop thinking about the problems they're working on.
Now excuse me, I think I have an idea I need to go try out! ;)
I agree, that's why I suggest to not use time tracking as a final metric. I argue though, that such stats would show some interesting and not very obvious tendencies.