Beware Productivity Meter!

Productivity Meter is a Windows application that lurks in the background of your computer and tracks your activity. This is great news for bosses, terrible news for employees and kind of irrelevant when you’re traveling for work. I mean, it shouldn’t be any skin off your company’s back if you spend your nights at the Holiday Inn reading up on the Business Travel Logue or watching YouTube videos, right? But we all know bosses will go to great lengths to ensure productivity.

Anyway, this vile application tracks all sorts of things that probably violate your privacy. It compares idle time to active time, how much time you spend on the various applications found on your PC AND which websites you visit most often and the length of time spent on those websites.

Now, if you’re using Productivity Meter to track productivity for your own purposes, the application does have a few handy tricks up its sleeve. You can tag programs, windows, and domains with key words to show which domains you access for certain tasks and jobs. I can see this being particularly handy for people in industries in which their work time is billable, such as attorneys. You can tag websites you may be using to research a certain case. I’m not sure you can go so far as to tag a particular document to time the amount of time spent on a pleading, but it definitely has possibilities.

Conversely, if you’re spending more time on Facebook than on work, you might want to be aware if your boss decides to install this program and get the mobile app for your social network of choice.

Via Lifehacker.