My desire to increase my productivity was not solely (or largely) driven by doing better at my job; I find it's relatively easy to be productive if you go into the office.
I mainly wanted to get a lot of side projects/hobbies done.
I'll just leave this here - when remote/junior contractors have a focus issue we simply require them to use software which screenshots their desktop at random intervals during work hours. This usually revolves the issue, if it doesn't, we start actually looking at the screenshots from time to time and providing feedback.
It's a cheap and simple solution to the problem of people spending half their work hours puttering around on Twitter etc.
No. It's completely justified, humane and good when you have a contractor or employee who's dicking around, failing to meet expectations and the alternative is termination.
That's when we use it. Some people need to have discipline imposed from an external source, if they don't have it, they will fail.
If they turn their performance around they can ask to have it removed and we usually grant the ask. I don't have anyone senior on my team who has to use this system, because part of becoming senior is developing the discipline to not need this.
We give freedom to those who perform and explicit, direct, unambiguous corrective guidance to those who don't.
It's frankly a great system at the right time and place. I thought the OP's post was very interesting because being watched improves output for many people. Managers like having people in the office for this reason, too. But the OP's way of having himself watched was very expensive. You can do it for 15 bucks a month with a SaaS. The most interesting part is that performance usually improves even if no one is looking at the screenshot. This is an awful lot more relaxing than having someone hover over your shoulder all day, whether they're a manager or a person you hired.
Thanks for making the effort to judge us with zero context and six words though.
I'm all against employee surveillance but I actually would take part in that for several reasons:
- It's business devices, so there should be no private stuff in any of the screenshots.
- It's screenshots, so it's just a point-in-time. There's no way to determine how long a sequence was. For both sides.
- The rule seems to be that it should just set boundaries. There's no proactive monitoring. They only seem to look at the screenshots if productivity does not raise.
Obviously, lower intervalls may be problematic. If there are maybe 15-30 screenshots a day, I don't see any issue (for me).
> In the morning session, I did yoga, went to the gym, started two blog posts, and did some work for my job.
If it's the 5th you mention, it's just not that important?