well, the paper is submitted. but man, i NEVER want to do that again. and by “that” i mean write a single-author paper in about a week. i’d been working on analysis (along with all my other dissertation- and work-related stuff) for months, but when we returned from the holiday weekend — where i tried and failed to write — all i had done was a bunch of statistics, graphs, and notes.
i’ve been using this service called RescueTime for the past several weeks as a way to track my hours for different projects i am working on, and as an indicator of my productivity in general. basically, you install a little app on your computer, and it sends data about what applications are active to the RescueTime server. you can log in and see reports of how much time you are spending looking at which apps and web pages (for $8/mo. you can get reports broken down by window title, not just application).
i have been happy to learn that i don’t “waste” as much time as i might have thought. but this past week isn’t a very accurate indication of my normal work habits. i went from notes and graphs to a 10-page ACM-format paper in a week:
(click for animated gif showing May 26 – June 1)
it’s nice to see that i’ve still “got it”, i guess. but that was not a fun week.
i highly recommend RescueTime, if like me you want to be more meta about how you spend your time, and like looking at data.
