Summary
I am slightly obsessed with productivity. In the past, I have used ‘how I felt’ about my productivity as the primary endpoint instead of actually measuring it. In the last month, I have committed to finding at least some measure of my productivity that is objective. Since I do almost all my work nowadays on the computer, monitors that track my activity there are a good start. So I choose to activate RescueTime and logkeys. I am also participating in a Harvard doctoral study that sends me thrice daily surveys on my happiness and some factors that might be related. Hopefully these data will lead to some interesting correlations that I can later test. Supplementation is probably a big player here and I have yet to devise a passive way to measure that. Still working on untracked productivity such as any project in the real world…
Logkeys
Install Logkeys using the .deb file here. I couldn’t figure out how to get logkeys to start on boot. The service kept giving errors about the existence of a keyboard device even though I checked it many times. It turns out that logkeys doesn’t follow links. Rather than use DEVICE=/dev/by-id/platform-i8042-serio-0-event-kbd in /etc/default/logkeys, I should have been using where that linked to: DEVICE=/dev/input/event4. Now it starts up great. A note: since logkeys starts before the home directory is decrypted, you must put your keymap in a system folder. Now my keymap is in /etc/default/keymap with the logkeys default set to KEYMAP=/etc/default/keymap. I also had to change the DAEMON_OPTS line in /etc/init.d/logkeys to DAEMON_OPTS="-s -d $DEVICE -o $LOGFILE -m $KEYMAP $DAEMON_OPTS".