Typical Day at Work

So recently I was made aware of this little program that will draw your cursor movement across your desktop. Since I'm in front of a computer for a majority of my day, both at work and at home I thought it would be interesting to make a little comparison. However, given my mac's recent problems I decided that I should maybe stick to the work computer. So after 8 or so hours of work I was left with this.

Cursor Movement at Work

The circles represent a stop, so the bigger the circle the longer the cursor was idling. The colors don't really have any significance [I think] other than helping to differentiate between stops. There is also an option to track your movement across dual desktops, although it wouldn't work for my setup so I tried to stay on one desktop as much as I could for best results. There are plenty of other option including overlaying your graph over your wallpaper. The program doesn't need any installation so I was able to run it on my work computer where I don't have install privileges.

The biggest circle in the graph is lunch, I left the program and my computer running so I could compare it to other stops. A couple of the other bigger stops are meetings where I stepped away from my desk, but a lot of them are due to me stopping the cursor to either type or read something. There is also probably more stops than movement in my graph because whenever possible I try to use keyboard short cuts, also when I read text on a browser I use the scroll wheel  instead of moving the mouse all over the place.

The majority of the action [or inaction] seems to be center around... well the center. I wonder whether this is true of all actions or only because I was doing work. It would be interesting to see a similar graph for me playing a computer game, or maybe just browsing reddit on the weekend. I recommend checking the program out yourself and seeing what you find about your computer use. It could make a cool wallpaper or printout and you could probably even convince someone that it's a piece of modern art, just give it a complicated title that talks about the "human condition".