Behold… the interruptron!

In the attention economy (you should really read our introduction), what matters is your attention. Modern life is plagued with interruptions, some self-imposed (do you have a popup that lets you know when new mail arrives?), some not (phone ringing, people knocking on your door). The axiom is simple: your productivity is inversely proportional to the number of interruptions per hour. There exist psychological research that proves that doing two tasks -A,B- in an alternating sequence -ABABAB- is a lot harder than doing them on batches -AAABBB-. This is called task switch cost. Some research on economics proves that the same concept –switching tasks often is bad for productivity- is true organizations.

This is so simple it’s staggering. We thought: well, we don’t know how often we are interrupted, but we should! That’s how the interruptron was born.

The modern knowledge worker has a very short average time between interruptions. Some estimates are as low as 10 minutes. We need to be aware of when we have been interrupted and try to stretch time between interruptions as much as possible. Also, it’s important to be aware of when we are floating into ‘unproductive time’ and have some method to nag us back to work. This is the goal of the interruptron. Run it always, and you’ll have a good gasp of where your time goes.

Interface

The main interface is an ‘always on top’ window that looks like this:

test

There are three clocks:

  • Yellow: working time
  • Red: unscheduled rest (interruptions)
  • Green: scheduled rest

You can set these intervals in the options page.

You should assign a shortcut that is really easy to apply to ‘start-stop’. You are going to use this shortcut every time you are interrupted, and that is a lot :) .

The black numbers next to each of these clocks are counters that indicate how many intervals you have done. For example, in the example picture, I have done one full 45-min working interval, and I have 28 minutes to go till the end of the next one. I have had an interruption of 7:22 minutes, and I have not taken my rest (the counter next to the green clock is zero).

As soon as I enter interruption zone, the red counter stars ticking. The font size of the red counter will grow proportionately to how much time the current interruption lasts… to the point of covering your entire screen if you don’t go back to work!

enlarged

Logging and graphics

One of the most interesting things you can do thanks to the interruptron is to have immediate visual information on how your time has been used. You can graph the current workday or any past day, and even have a look at the tasks you have accomplished, how much time you dedicated to them, and how much activity (keystrokes, words written) you produced while doing them. At any time, you can show a plot like this for the current day or any time interval:

graphical

You can see a list of the activities for a day:

grap

You can also select an interval or the whole month. This is a great way to answer the dreaded “where did my time go?” question at the end of the month. taskreport

Download

The interruptron is free software. Simply unzip into any directory and start using it. It doesn’t alter your registry since all settings are saved into an .ini file; it’s also portable (you can take it with you in an usb stick). You should go to options > automation and set a folder to set your log files to. Then, define a few shortcuts to start/stop and give it a try.

To get the interruptron, simply give us your email and we will send you the download information.
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This just a small sample of what is coming from workingcogs! This is why we encourage you to sign up for our mailing list. We will notify you with any new versions of this software. We will also let you know when our flagship product, eyeCue, gets released.

You can browse the documentation online or download it in pdf form.

You can also post comments in the announcement post.