It is as if you were doing work (opens in new tab)

Or just click the "About" icon...

> 1. It needs a fake calendar that is randomly populated with meetings.

While we're on this, can everyone please post their favorite ridiculous meeting title that is really real? I'll start with a recurring meeting series from last year that was called "mid-sprint calibration".

> 1. It needs a fake calendar that is randomly populated with meetings.

Not enough to compete with the real deal. Has to have multiple team calendars, so it can support conflicting mandatory meetings so people can bitch at you on Google Hangouts and Slack afterward for missing the ones you didn't attend, even though you'd told everyone in advance that you couldn't make it.

If it's a video game, couldn't you still use real chat apps to chat with real other users?

Maybe I quit before I got to this, but I would add:

4. Time-sensitive pop-ups: things that force you to act NOW instead of ignoring them.

ha ha yes random calendar items

My god, I'm starting to think Post Insurance Trauma meetings are in order. Everyone else I've met who worked/started in Insurance feels the same way. I can still recall those janky 'Internet Safety' etc. web seminars that restart if you accidentally click the wrong button and inexplicably take 45 minutes.

Do I sense another Blue Cross Blue Shield survivor?

I remember the first time I used X Window and noticed windows not stealing focus. It was one of those times where you realize you have not even understood the full extent of your abuse. Approx. 20 years later and Windows still can't get this basic thing right.

Today I found out that MS "solutions" can also go in the other direction by not telling you what happened.

Scenario:

- You're forced to use TFS. - Your credientials are managed by a Windows domain controller. - The same credentials are used to authentify with TFS. - Your password expires.

Welcome to a non-trivial amount of time trying to figure out what happened. This is the single scenario I've encountered so far where interrupting my workflow would have been sensible, and it seemingly is also the only one where Windows doesn't do it.

I miss Git so much ._.

One of my favorite things about OSX is the fact that applications rarely / never are allowed to steal focus.

Literally happened to me the other day:

I was typing something in Slack and sudd-

> A new version of Ubuntu is available. Would you like to upgrade? [Don't Upgrade] [Ask me Later] [Yes, Upgrade Now]

-enly I found out that "spacebar" acts as a click of the selected default button and the rest of my sentence ended up in the password field.

I dismissed the slightly confused password prompt and didn't see the message again for the remainder of the day.

Yes, Canonical, while I'm typing something in Slack is exactly the moment I want to tell you whether I want to update my operating system.

One thing that still happens to me on an infrequent but regular basis is clicking on something I didn't intend because something popped up under my cursor. In general, this seems like a hard problem to solve. I want notifications to pop up but I could happen to be doing something in that area of the screen.

Just like real life. I am sure this is intentional.

There are plenty of games that have "busywork" aspects. The term for it in gaming is "grinding" (implies mindlessness, even though it is sometimes used in a different context). The vast majority of RPGs, especially old-school JRPGs and MMORPGs, require you do "grind" to get to a certain level to unlock more stages.

Many modern mobile games are literally just mindless busywork with an option to pay money to skip some of the busywork. The whole "clicker" genre is totally mindless.

There are plenty of games that fit your criteria, so maybe you're just playing the wrong types of games?

…and, I'm missing a word, so I said the opposite of what I meant:

If only some games had less busywork as part of their gameplay.

To reply @stdbrouw and @ericdykstra: I hate grinding. Old-school RPGs and mobile F2P games are guilty of this. But all other games that have random collectibles in an open world, or "do X Y times" trophies/achievements are just adding stuff to keep you busy. I heard some people like this, but it's not my thing.

> It's also a reflection on modern gaming in general. If only some games had busywork as part of their gameplay, they'd feel less tiring and more fun.

Like grinding in an MMORPG? I'm not so sure.

>> If only some games had busywork as part of their gameplay, they'd feel less tiring and more fun.

Is this a joke?

A huge number of games have mindless busywork as part of the play. Whole genre's are based on it.

You're trying to achieve/build/win/unlock X? Great, spend the next 14 hours mindlessly and repetitively mining rocks until you can't carry any more rocks, and then putting them in the rock store, and mining more rocks!

Hm, that's a side of gaming that is foreign to most people who call themselves "gamers" (even casual gamers). A game like starcraft is much more complex (by orders of magnitude) than chess, a game with a respected intelligence component. AI cannot (yet) outperform human teams in mobas like league of legends or overwatch. These are the titles i think of when thinking about "modern gaming".

EDIT: nevermind, I see it was a typo on OP's part, rendering my comment irrelevant. OP wanted less busywork, but forgot the word "less". :-)

If only some games had busywork as part of their gameplay

Mass Effect, Fallout 4, and Destiny come immediately to mind. Considering that I don't play a wide swath of video games, I'm sure I've missed many more.

"As mankind's last and best hope, busy though you might be, you're the only one qualified to get the old woman's cat out of a tree."

> This must be what most people working on a desk must feel like

Out of curiosity - as opposed to?

> If only some games had busywork as part of their gameplay

Try Mass Effect

Before you switched back, did you also realize that c) you're also not really required to do most of your "real work"?

I would imagine that it's a number greater than zero.

I had to stop myself. The power of habit is strong!

I typed my work username twice. Shows how simple social engineering can be.

Likewise, until I realised that just holding down space kept the auto typing going.

Always game the system!

Surprised these kind of apps aren't available as a plugin for a text editor. Would be bit more fun. :)

It is just as much an indictment of managerial input on UI, or anything really. "This is important, it should grab focus." The same basic mentality that gets all issues listed as priority 1.

You do realize that calendar picker is the stock jQuery UI picker

I had to close it because it was too similar to being at work, on my day off.

And the actual work itself is also not really valuable and it's okay if it never actually gets done. Most projects end up in a semi-failed state anyways.

Jonathan Blow has given a bunch of talks on that topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU

That sounds like a super interesting read, too bad you can't find it :(

In general I'd expect the backlash from an unsatisfactory daily report to be low, there's a lot of opportunity to coach you and it lets your supervisor coach you/steer you if you've developed an inconsistency. It's also an opportunity to get domain specific knowledge of pitfall you might experience integrating with an existing system.

I think that deliberately making a to-be-scrapped system just to generate some work-done for the report is a waste of your time and you'd be better just making the real progress you can within the day and then reporting on how it's going/what (if anything) is stopping you from making progress; in general I don't think that tasks which take more than a day are expected to be complete.

The report is really about making sure that you're not sitting there unable to make any progress for days/weeks/months at a time resulting in an unexpected failure to deliver at the other end.

HTH.

I would say that if you've done any work in a productive direction, you've achieved something that day and can feel ok reporting your work in progress. Not all tasks may be able to be finished in a day, but you can make incremental progress on anything, even if it's only to find out a particular approach is infeasible.

The report should show what you are working on, where you are spending your time, etc. It is about time spent more than achievements per se. It can alert your senior that you need training on a particular task that is taking too much time or that the task itself is too difficult.

   var jobTitler = {
     subject: [
       "Screen", //100
       "Input", //400
       "Dialog", //900
       "Interface", //1600
       "Data", //2500
       "Big Data", //3600
       "Choice", //4900
       "System", //6400
       "Computation", //8100
    ], // 9
     position: [
       "Administrator", //1000
       "Technician", //4000
       "Engineer", //9000
       "Specialist", //16000
       "Architect", //25000
       "Executive", //36000
       ]
   }

https://pippinbarr.github.io/itisasifyouweredoingwork/js/dat...

I'm guessing Computation Executive might be the highest if it uses the position field. (Don't have time to see how this data gets used to set the title.)

They even started with my favorite quote:

Ever tried, ever failed, no matter.

Try again, fail again, fail better.

I determined that the most efficient way to play this game is to ignore every task that isn't typing for character count, including never actually saving once you get to the minimum character count for the current task. As you go up in levels, the number of work units you accomplish per character goes up, and you continue accruing work units even if you do "extra credit" on one of your tasks by exceeding the minimum. So it pays to just keep returning focus to whatever window you were typing in and never stopping. I think it also might stop giving you new tasks once you have a certain number stacked up, which lets you have uninterrupted keyboard-mashing time to get those promotions. :D

Using this strategy, I managed to hit the Computation Administrator progress cap almost immediately after my first "well-deserved break".

I once posited this video as answer to "what does the project management group do all day?" and giggled more than was appropriate while watching it over his shoulder. Great video! Underrated.

Can you kick up the 4d3d3d3

Here you go http://celeryman.alexmeub.com/

Oh no! You should take a break after 4 hours. Otherwise you lose focus in the afternoon and become less productive!

UBlock Origin blocks some of the scripts, disable it.

Same on my desktop Chrome!

Not really surprising, it's simulating a desktop with mouse and keyboard.