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Marc: Idea - Let people track how long after they wake up they start working

@marc 
Every morning when I wake up I weigh myself and log it in MyFitnessPal, and I want to start tracking how long it takes me after I wake up to actually start working, as a first step towards trying to minimize it ("what gets measured gets managed"). I thought this might be an interesting thing to add to WIP, maybe as an optional part of the UI that would only appear on the user's profile (so things don't get cluttered), with maybe a graph or something.

The idea is to try to help people find ways to cut down on how much time they waste in the morning before they get started for the day, and minimize the opportunity for some other fun thing to start taking over their attention (e.g. social media).

Just an idea.


Fun idea! I think it's too specialized for WIP (I try to keep the codebase minimal), but you should be able to build this fairly easily with the API ( wip.co/api ) by fetching recent todos and looking at the created_at timestamps along with the time_zone values. (the time_zone value for each todo represents the time_zone your account was set to at the time the todo was created)

Although now that I think about it, we could do it slightly differently and it might have wider appeal. Or maybe this is what you meant. Here's what I have in mind now:

A column chart similar to iPhone's sleep schedule. The x axis represent the days (each day is a column). The y axis represents the hour of the day. The column goes from first todo created (e.g. 8am) to last todo created (e.g. 9pm).

The length of the columns will show the work session times (longer columns is longer work sessions). Where they start and stop shows when you start and stopped working. We can also show dots within the column for each completed todo.

Times would be adjusted for the time zone you were in at that moment.

I agree it would be an interesting visualization.

One challenge would be figure out what to do with work sessions that end AFTER midnight. Which I think is quite common.

I guess a simpler solution would be not to show columns, but just dots for each completed todo.

I was imagining a little square widget on the user's profile in the right sidebar. The X axis is days, the Y axis is the amount of time it took the person to start working (self-reported).

The idea would be you could have several different types of productivity-measures that people could track. For example, MyFitnessPal lets you track steps per day, but I don't use that functionality.

I think your proposed version would definitely result in a smaller codebase since you wouldn't be collecting and storing additional types of information, my only reservation is that I don't think it would be particularly useful to me without knowing 1) when I woke up that day (maybe have that as a special TODO type that gets ignored on the homepage / profile so it doesn't clutter the UI?), 2) how difficult the TODO was, since some of my tasks take many hours to complete (I suppose it would incentivize having small tasks to jumpstart the day, which is a productivity tip I've already been wanting to use).