Yesterday I had an idea to simplify this task. I setup a new Twitter account specifically for this task. Then I downloaded a Twitter client and setup a cron entry to automatically open the twitter client every 15 minutes throughout my work day. So now documenting my work day is pretty unobtrusive. And if my coworkers ever want a glimpse of what I'm up to, they can simply subscribe to my Twitter feed.
I've been auditing my work time in a similar manner for the past couple of weeks and have found this extremely valuable. I'm finding 4 main benefits:
- I feel pressured to be more productive so I actually have something to include in my entries. It's a kind of accountability.
- I can quickly review my week so that preparing status reports for management is easier.
- I'm seeing areas where I get bogged down and am unproductive, as well as times of day that I'm simply wasting time or goofing off.
- I have a historical log so that I can diagnose issues down the road. Lots of times we'll see where one of our systems started having problems on a certain date or time; and now it's easier to recall what might have changed during that particular time frame.
Do you have any other creative uses for Twitter.com?

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