Academic Productivity

I while ago I designed a simple program to track how often I’m interrupted and to prevent myself from going into a ‘shaving Yaks’ excursion every time I have to touch a browser.

The interruptron works by growing in size as your ‘unscheduled break’ (or procrastination escapade) elapses. It can cover your entire screen, so it’s hard to ignore. it also lets you save what you did and plot some basic stats.

It turns out people are actually using it. Even making videos about it:

I wasn’t very impressed myself when I released it to tell you the truth, but this little program seems to be a crowd pleaser. Another user asked for the source and is actually doing a rewrite. I was surprised when he told me about his background: he was the person responsible for the email engine of one of the most trafficked sites on the web. We’ll be working together and probably implementing more features, but don’t hold your breath.

Anyway, I didn’t announce it here in ap.com. Maybe it’s time to do it now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 3:02 am and is filed under Announcements, Software, Time management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.