Motivation gamification

General Discussions
#1

TL;DR: if you struggle to motivate yourself to be productive throughout the day, install a keylogger capable of making pretty graphs.

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It seriously helps, as you are forced to face the facts after a day’s (hard?) work. Bonus points for sharing the stats with your boss, or publishing them on a daily basis (on your own site, not here, you silly!).

http://www.lukepaynesoftware.com/projects/keystrokes/ :point:
(it also exports CSVs allowing you to make graphs of multiple days)

Do you have (even) betters ways to keep yourself accountable?

#2

I have to be a little bit honest here… one of my biggest motivators is looking at any sort of analytic page. One of the main reason I love open source so much is that it keeps me motivated to move forward. When I see that my overall statistics are rising, it boosts my spirits that I can keep on enduring. Some of the websites that have given me these motivations are…

Ohloh.net

They have so many statistics dealing with open source projects, and so many ways to compare your progress with other projects of the same or different languages. I always am motivated to keep my statistics as high as I can knowing that my projects do not have the budget or resources many of the projects on here do.

Github.com

Keeping track of the repository history is nice, but nothing keeps me motivated like the graph sections. By looking at how much work that I’ve done over time, just like Ohloh, it impacts me to continue to do work.

Honorable Mentions

Actually, any place that has any sort of analytic system really keeps me motivated. Some recent ones that I like to track are Bloggers, Google Analytics, and even some non-programming ones like DeviantArt.

More effective or less effective than your example Riven, I don’t know. But, when I am down on my luck and I feel like I’m not getting anything done, there is something about looking at that past progress that perks me right back up and gets me coding again. I guess there is some benefit for me being such a “pack rat” after all.

#3

So from 9 to 19 is the time when I can find you active on Skype/mirc/jgo ?

#4

Well, I don’t Skype/IRC at work. It’s my super awesome habit, learned the hard way - it just costs so much time and totally breaks your flow, which is the holy grail for me. If I could go offline during coding, I would. I usually visit JGO during some lengthy build/deploy. :emo:

#5

Got Blender rendering stuff right now, going to take at least an hour :
Begin distractions! :point:

#6

www.rescuetime.com

Cas :slight_smile:

#7

I think I prefer plain and simple stats where I have to draw the conclusion, over in-depth analysis and forced behavior modification. I’d feel violated in my privacy if some tool would show a popup that I spent too much time on this forum. My main problem is getting in the flow, and staying there, while getting interrupted every 10 minutes by emails/people. Normally it takes 5-10s to notice and read a mail, discard it and switch back to Eclipse, but then it takes up to 15 minutes to forget the world around me. This keylogger shows I’m unproductive, even while Eclipse is open and I’m actually coding - slowly. When doing a build/deploy, I’m out of my flow anyway, so visiting JGO is… perfectly fine, we wouldn’t want some tool to get the wrong impression! – mkay :slight_smile:

To each his own. You using this tool was my reason to head out and seek a cruder one.

#8

Set up a second machine then you don’t have these kind of excuses!

#9

I only look at the headline stats (“hours spent productive”) on rescuetime. What I like about it most though is that it logs my time on the laptop at home as well. And I can point Mrs Prince at it and use the numbers to whatever advantage I seek at the time :wink:

Cas :slight_smile: