Figuring out ‘what I’m doing’ on my computer

Recently I started using Pennyworth, a context sensing application. It keeps track of your active applications, as well as more complicated stuff like your social context (alone, public, office) and your location (home, office, Argo Tea). You train the machine learner so it can predict your location, social context and activities, or tell it rules. My goal is to figure out how I’m spending my time for my own information / productivity and to keep track of my hours for a few projects that require reports.

In the process of training this application I had to figure out what the application calls activities, which took me a while. It isn’t useful to think of activities as application-specific things like ’spreadsheet’ or ‘finder’ since it keeps track of active application already, and it isn’t useful to think about them as projects ‘mil blogs’ or ‘credibility’ since there’s a separate field for projects. My activities, I figured out, were things like writing, data analysis and taking notes, which I do in several applications for several different projects.

Now that I have this set up properly I think it will be very interesting to see ‘what I’m doing’ according to these three different measures, active application, activities, and projects. Then again, maybe I don’t want to know :)