Keep Honest

An objective method to monitor how much productive you truly are.

It is quite easy to get lost in the “social media” storm, even if the social media is technical and often relevant to the work. (eg:N, Reddit, Twitter etc.,). The cost of engaging in constant stream of information is that it is quite easy to get distracted.

The first step to get rid of a habit is to measure and assess it’s true impact.

One way to do this is to look back at your workscreen over the span of a day and see how much of it was spent in distractions.

We will be needing an application called scrot, which takes screenshots of the desktops from the shell.

Install scrot

$ sudo apt-get install scrot 

Create a directory to store the screenshots

$ mkdir ~/keephonest

Call scrot every minute and save the image to a folder.

$ crontab -e

Add the second line to the crontab

# m h  dom mon dow   command
* * * * * env DISPLAY=:0 /usr/bin/scrot /home/USERNAME/keephonest/screen\%F-\%T.png > /dev/null

Let crontab+scrot record your screen for an entire day. Play the screenshots using a GUI application (eg: Eye of Gnome – eog) to see where most of your time was spent.