Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Show HN: Deep Work Stats – How much time do you have for deep work? (shepherd.com)
76 points by remyp on Oct 1, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments


Hi all, OP here.

Inspired by Cal Newport’s book “Deep Work”, our app crunches 12 months of calendar data and shows you how much time you have for deep work and shallow work, how much of your life is spent in meetings, and compares you to the average inside your company and globally.

Example report here: https://app.shepherd.com/personal-report/sample/pages/my-wor...

Why did we build this? We loved Cal Newport’s book ‘Deep Work’ and we wanted to try to estimate how much time people have for deep work, shallow work, and meetings. Plus show how they compare to other makers/managers inside their company and globally.

How does it work? We do a read only connection to your calendar API and crunch 12 months of data and summarize the results for you.

What do we use the anonymized data for? Your data is never sold or shared. We use the anonymized data to show job seekers what a typical day is like for an engineer at different companies. We are hoping to ship that feature after we get enough data in a few weeks.

Happy to answer any questions you might have!


Can you slice the data by day of week? If a weekly meeting(s) is(are) necessary, any insights on if better on M/Tu/W/Th/F?

Any strength / significance measures against weekly meeting times vs total weekly deep work hours?


Yep, we can and we will work to push an update down the road that shows it per day to break it down further.

Good q! Mostly what we have seen is that if you have a lot of short meetings that break apart your day it really hurts deep work as you are constantly trying to get back into a flow state.


Hard to engage in deep reading of this post when there is a popover covering 40% of my mobile browser viewport with a 5 (!) checkbox form on consenting to cookies and tracking. Good gravy.


Well, we wanted to be very clear we use cookies :), noted though and I'll look for an alternative.


I don’t know a single person on this earth other than perhaps Richard Stallman who has the slightest care in the world that their browser is storing a cookie from your website. 99% of the internet would fail to work without them. These warnings are obnoxious.


Of course everyone hates them, but if you're going to operate in the EU you're stuck with 'em.


Functional cookies are allowed without popup, and always have been.


GDPR FWIW


Super cool! I like that it estimates how much all my meetings cost over the last 12 months. That gives real motivation for cancelling the ones that aren't really useful!


I love this concept and really value the idea of knowing how much time is wasted on meetings. I think as your system evolves and if you allow for some AI/human interaction (I tell your system how to categorize certain things) then it'll get even more accurate. Really nice work building this!


This is cool. I can think of a number of places I've worked where having this data for the whole company probably would've been really enlightening.


Thanks! That is a big reason we added comparisons to the average maker/manager inside the company and globally. Just so you can kinda see how you compare too.


Awesome, shows how effective and productive you can be if you had more time for deep work!


Huh! I always wonder how much of my day is actually spent working 100% on what matters.


Really cool!


Very cool!


Nice!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: