I am a software engineer (nowadays everybody calls themselves as engineer; but when I ask them about the measuring, calculating their metrics; they usually can’t answer; if there is no metrics; there is no engineer), and I was thinking how productive am I during a day. I couldn’t find a good metric for myself to answer this question.
I am a member of Inland Empire .NET user group and our user group has incredible number of raffle offs. I am not bragging but I visit 3-5 user groups in a month; and I compare it :). A few months ago, I won TimeSnapper tool; and decided to give it a try. It is a very simple too that runs in the background, and takes snapshots of your desktop in a frequency that you determine. You can also set the applications as a productivity tool; such as in my case I mark Visual Studio, google.com, outlook as productivity applications. The application monitors the processes that are running and comparing it with the list of productivity applications. Anytime you want; it tells you how productive you are by comparing your list and running programs. You can also replay the snapshots to see your day :).
After running this tool for 3 weeks; I wanted to see my productivity ratio, and I got ~65%. This means during an 8 hour of working day, I do 2.4 hours not work related stuff . TimeSnapper also considers the time that you are not using your computer; so being in a meeting and not using your computer does not decrease your productivity. This is a pretty low number for me; and I thought about ways to increase this number. During a day; facebook; twitter; msn messenger; forum.ceviz.net (a turkish forum about programming), stackoverflow.com are the items that take most of my time. I decide to cut my time for these things; but some of them are addictive :). It is an easy task to disable my network connection; so that I can concentrate on programming more; and enable it for 10 mins every other hour or so; however it is not that easy as I use google.com a lot. Also I get calls during the day about a site that is not working right.
So to cut the long story short; I don’t have a quick solution for this; but I decided to cut back my time on facebook,twitter, msn, forums starting in August at last %50. Let’s see how this works :)