goiotworkinterrupttrackerlambda

README

GoIoTWorkInterruptTrackerLambda

Simple Lambda function to track work context switches to help understand impact to productivity

Background

One thing I've learned through my time in the professional world is that there are many interruptions to the work cycle during the day. At one point, I wanted to quantify just how bad the context switching was assuming a re-ramp time of 15-30 minutes. Also, tracking time diverted for things like escalations. The problem was that I needed to be able to explain "where the time went" when my metrics were lower than other people. The cause for this was actually because I was a central escalation point for people even at the same job level as myself and I would be interrupted from work or have to work an escalation from a colleague, but would end up receiving no credit for time spent because the mechanism for logging multiple engineer inputs was suboptimal.

Problem

I needed to create something (but often lacked time/energy) to track these context switches. To create a simple solution (with a more elegant one to come in future revisions), I want to press a button to represent an externally imposed context switch (such as a manager interruption, external team request, escalation, etc.) as a knowledge experiment to understand how much productivity is lost due to various external triggers to context switch during the middle of the day. I want to start by just tracking interruptions, but over time, I want to track activation/deactivation and/or time deltas to track total time lost due to inefficiencies in processes.

Solution

1. Create a DDB table with a very simple key:
   • device_id+timestamp would be a unique key for the purpose of just tracking number of interruptions in say a week or a month (initial implementation)
   • device_id alone, which would provide the ability to update state through a single attribute (ie. what is the current state of the button: {0,1}) (implement in v1.1)
2. Create a lambda function that triggers an update to ddb for the above value(s)
3. Create a cloudwatch dashboard that can help aggregate data for the last X per time period
4. IAM role for lambda function
5. IAM role for IOT button (could be implemented virtually or through a mobile app as well)

To use this, just compile and load the lambda function to your account and create the rest of the resources to point the lambda function towards.

How to use

Create resources described above. After creating the resources, attach the iot button to your AWS account and just press the button to test.