#106 Musings

As I have probably talked about on here before I quite like tracking my personal data. Whether that be steps, sleeping, work productivity etc. Not quite the quantified self but I think data is always important.

I was using Rescuetime to automatically track my pc usage. To see when I was actually being productive and when I was distracted or becoming distracted. Over time, I have found out that on boring tasks I can do about 20 minutes before I'm distracted. With this information I can now just build in a break to short circuit getting distracted and wasting hours on something else.

The problem I have always had with RescueTime is that essentially I need to trust them to hold my data. This is because I have essentially just installed a spying piece of software on my own pc. Now their Privacy Policy is fairly robust but it isn't End-to-End encrypted so feasibly the company can use that data. That's a concern. I am trying to support privacy focused companies like Signal, Standard Notes and ProtonMail, with my time, attention and financials.

I found an open source tool called ActivityWatch. It's early days but it runs locally, no server requried. All the data stays with me and they give me all the data rather than just summaries or categories. The amount of data can be overwhelming but I trust my ability to synthesise it into a readable state.

Till next time,

B