Power of computers...

Category: Technology

Published: 11/19/2008 11:33 a.m.

I am really getting to the functionality behind the wordpress blog software. There are a ton of import options. So all of my old blog posts are here now. Additionally, all of my google reader feeds have been brought to the sidebar. All I had to do was trim around the edges. This is something that I very much like about computers and technology.

Computers need to be smart enough to do these types of things in more places. I have messed around with software (forgot the name) that tracks how much time you spend in each application. I spend a lot of time in firefox, not to my surprise. While just the software information is useful, it would be even more useful to tell me what I was doing, and for how long.

In more than one occasion at more than one job I have been asked to create a list of things I have done with the day. I view this as the most evil kind of busy work. Work by tracking your work? That's like blogging about blogging (which I realize I did at the top). It seems that a computer could be able to tell me what I have done. It keeps track of the websites I visit, the emails I send, the files I save, and so on. It also keeps my calendar, and could say how long I was in meetings and who they were with. This is what computing power should be used for: tracking metrics and items that I am busy working on. Like an assistant who writes down what I do every hour. I think that was a plot on The Office.

Turns out it was a plot on The Office. And this episode exposes the inherent problem with software like this. It shows that most people aren't always working so hard. It would show that some people (not me of course) like to chat and read rss feeds and do some shopping and other things while in the office. In most cases for most people this does not interfere with normal work. It's what is done in the inbetween time. And it is exactly what productivity-like tracking software would display. I blame computers.

Computers have access to all of these interesting things, and while providing great power, also provide great distractions. Before computers, and still in jobs like mining, people talked to each other. They chatted, they discussed things (like on a forum) and they did all of it while working. For many managers, it has always been cliche to say "get back to work". And maybe this is a function the computer could do, if it knows what I am doing, and can guess what I should be doing.

If a computer knows I have to-dos and knows their due dates, why can't it give me a pop-up with something like "I see you have been surfing the web for the last 20 minutes. Why don't you spend some time on that proposal" or something similar. This would be a great piece of software. Then, every hour or so it could pop up a little field and ask what I have been doing. Maybe it could even guess based on what application and files I have been using. And I could reply with a twitter-like message, and it could be distributed to my managers, as they would have everyone's feed so they could track project progress. I believe Yammer does this, but it is blocked by some firewalls.

This to me is the future of twitter and business management in a digital age. A lightweight, not very intrusive application that just asks "What are you doing right now at work?" every hour from 8-5, M-F. Write it for the web or something like Adobe Air, and sell it to companies. It should work different than chat, as it isn't used for one-to-one conversation (which is happening with twitter). And, it's not email. Because in many ways, using email in this way is one of the major abuses of email.

The big deal with this kind of stuff is integration. As I began with an example of wordpress integrating with both google reader and blogger.com, this kind of thing would need to integrate with personnel directories and desktop OS's and intranets and other stuff I don't even know about. The walled garden (see: itunes) only works if you can corner 3/4 of the market (see: ipod), otherwise it is an opponent to growth.

RECAP: A computer should be able to figure out what I am doing all day, but I want to be able to moderate that if I am just surfing the web. I send a snippet of what I am working on, and the boss can see it. Business can track time usage much better, and spend time better.

This might just be my million dollar idea. Mostly because it follows the maxim "this is something I could really use" which I believe to be the key to good software. I know something similar is out there already, but I don't think anyone is profiting yet, and there seems to be great potential for that.