RescueTime Blog

OP here - CoScreen offers multi-user screen sharing and simultaneous remote control for engineering teams like no other solution out there.
After the awesome reception on HN a year ago, we're super excited to announce our completely newly designed & developed v1.0 release of CoScreen for macOS and our private alpha for Windows.

Check it out here: https://coscreen.co [1]

Problem:

Today's video chat solutions are great if you enjoy awkward full-screen conversations, but are a productivity killer for development teams. The pandemic has turned endless, boring in-office meetings into endless, boring video calls. It’s also just too painful for engineering teams to wrangle with complex pull requests using a brittle string of tools like Zoom, Skype, Tmux, GNU screen, and a variety of IDEs.

Solution:

CoScreen enables pair/mob/team programming like no other solution and we believe it can reduce the cost of context switching by up to 80% [2] so you can focus on what actually matters - reviewing code, troubleshooting bugs, or building major new features.

CoScreen is a desktop app that enables multiple users to share application windows with each other at the same time. You can think of it like a shared desktop where any user can interact with any shared window as if it were their own via remote mouse and keyboard to allow them to collaborate like never before (they can even copy and paste code across windows of different users). In addition to built-in video chat, and remote…

From how they measure the productivity score: http://blog.rescuetime.com/breaking-down-the-rescuetime-productivity-score/

"But the bottom line is that the productivity score doesn’t tell you anything about what you actually produce. It’s simply a number that can give you an interesting baseline of where your attention is, but doesn’t tell 100% of the story. It’s a way to understand your patterns, and not a prescription for how you should be spending your time."

So, this is basically an indicator of how much time you spend on an activity and not how "productive" you are. Like they say, productivity is a charged word. I wish there was a way to tag productivity and efficiency together.

I see someone suggested Beeminder in the comments of your post (thank you, whoever that was!). Also by the creators of Beeminder (me and Bethany Soule) is TagTime, which is related to your idea of periodic prompts. We call TagTime "stochastic self-sampling" or "time-tracking for space cadets". It's not super friendly (a huge pain to get working on Windows, for example) but it's on github here: http://tagti.me

If you don't want to deal with TagTime (and I don't blame you) then just hooking up RescueTime to Beeminder is a great way to go. Here's what RescueTime says about Beeminder:

http://blog.rescuetime.com/2012/11/27/give-your-productivity-goals-some-teeth-with-beeminder/

Rescuetime changed my life -- I once hired someone to slap me in the face whenever I was unproductive on rescuetime -- and I ended up being all over the news because of it! https://blog.rescuetime.com/how-i-saved-4-hours-per-day-using-rescuetime/

Because of the experience, I built a wearable device company to make sure I stay productive -- we even integrate with rescuetime! (i'm getting vibrations right now whenever I'm in flow/90%+ productive).

Thanks for building such awesome tech, and let me know if you'd like to work on an integration together!

-Maneesh Sethi from pavlok

http://blog.rescuetime.com/2009/08/19/turning-off-the-distracting-parts-of-the-internet/

We're actually pretty close to this (just soft-launched our windows version-- mac version hot on its heels). Starting with focus "toggling" ("Shut of the bad parts of the internet for 30 minutes") and moving on to nudges ("let me know when I exceed 30m of news time") and blocking ("block social networking if I exceed X hours or X %").

Disabling the internet is a baby/bathwater thing for a lot of people, I think. There's too much value there to turn it off completely (research, etc).