Mouse click experiment
By Andrius Miasnikovas
After writing about keyboard oriented software I’ve been doing a little experiment for a few weeks now and I thought I’d share the results. I’ve been using a little program called Click Counter, well actually it’s a compiled AutoHotKey script which I found on this forum. Source for the script is available if you don’t like the idea of using an executable found on some forum. My idea was to track all my mouse clicks throughout the day and see how much I can reduce the amount of times I reach for the roddent. The Click Counter tool only produces data as a text file, but it’s way more fun to see some graphical representation of my clicking habits, so I threw together a simple Java program that reads the produced log file from the Click Counter and outputs a nice graph with monthly mean average. It’s done with maven and contains .bat files to further simplify the building and running process. So without further ado here are my results
One thing to note is that I record my mouse clicks only at work, so this also allows me to see of whether I can be more productive if I use the mouse less often. And the answer seems to be – yes, provided I don’t have to deal with some GUI like creating diagrams and such. Of course when I started the experiment I tried to reduce my mouse clicks as much as possible, but after a while you forget that you have the counter running and that’s when the real results are shown. My nearest goal is to get the monthly average curve under the 1.5k clicks per day. Has anybody else out there done anything like that? What is your experience?