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by zeroq 265 days ago
On one hand I'm super enthusiastic about your project.

This could help battle procrastination, organize your time in a long run, bill your clients more efficiently, etc. 20 years younger, hyper productive me would kill for such product.

But then I recall when I accidently suggested TimeRescue to my boss at one time, and suddenly he was skimming though everyones daily logs to see if they're spending 100% of their times in business facing apps.

When I first heard about "covid mouse mover devices" that faked activity for remote workers I thought it was a joke. Seriously.

But I'm afraid this is the dystopian future. Employers constantly looking at your screen and getting spreadsheets with your daily effort.

Overall, very disturbing product.

2 comments

This was my first thought too. The last generation of activity tracking, while still dystopian, was a little different at least in that it was mainly statistical. So action-wise, it might point managers at "potential problems," but doesn't make its way into a performance review (e.g. "your mouse only traveled 81.72 screen-miles this quarter, 2 standard deviations below the mean, while you also scored the lowest on number of keystrokes with vscode as the active window..."). If a manager really wanted to summarize exactly what was done they had to spend an almost equal amount of time to watch. To some degree, this alleviates that.
Yea, honestly I would hate if people used this to track _other_ people, especially bosses. I wanted to build something that gave people more agency to do more with their precious time, but there definitely is a fine line here.
Probably someone long ago said the same about hope for pointy sticks not being used just for hunting animals. Yet someone will likely make a pointy stick whether you do it or not.
oppenheimer said that about dynamite /s