The Work Monitor App
A Short Story By Adam Furgang — October 8, 2020
The app started like countless others. One day you just heard of it from some friend or family member and then wondered how long it’d been around. It was a simple app too, with not a lot of menus and settings, although it did require the use of a smartwatch. It became so popular so fast that smartwatches became scarce for a short time. The manufacturing infrastructure was ready though, so it wasn’t long before upgraded smartwatches were everywhere. Even people who hated smartwatches were buying them just to use this app.
The app started as a gimmick, really. Or at least that’s how everyone perceived it. —An app that monitors how much you think about work. Kids used it to monitor school time and homework and adults used it to monitor work thoughts. It wasn’t perceived as too dissimilar from the many screen time monitoring apps that already existed. It used existing wrist monitors built into smartwatches to record heart rate, breathing rate, glucose, blood pressure, nerve impulses, and several other metabolic processes.
It used AI and algorithms too, and there was a period of time after downloading the app that a person had to “train” and interact with it. For the first week, you’d set it to monitor you only between working hours. So, if you worked Monday through Friday from 9am to 5pm, that’s when the app was set to monitor you. During the second week it was the opposite and it only monitored you during non-work hours. For best results, the app, the smartwatch, and the cellular phone all needed to be online as much as possible. The app recommended charging devices during showers, when watching TV, or during mealtime to insure a pattern developed. Wearing the smartwatch while sleeping with the cellular phone charged nearby was essential too, as the smartwatch needed to monitor people during REM sleep. During the third week, you’d set the app to monitor 24/7. During that period, the app would periodically ask questions on the cellular phone. “Are you thinking about work now?” Sometimes the questions required choosing from a drop-down menu. “What is your mind occupied with now? Choose the best response.” Then there was a list to choose from:
Work
Family
Food
Friends
Relaxing
Exercise
Sleep
Sex
Bathroom
Alcohol
Smoking
Recreational drugs
After the third week, the app started to process all the information and began to deliver measured results regarding how much time your brain was occupied with various thoughts. Work was just one aspect, but it was the work metrics that astonished everyone. Time spent on friends, family, food, sex, etc. were all alarmingly small for most people. While time spent either at work, commuting to work, getting ready for work, and thinking about work — including dreaming about work — added up to an astonishingly large amount of time. Usually somewhere in the range of 70 or more hours a week out of 168 hours.
After the app added up the time a person spent sleeping, eating, bathing, and using the bathroom in one week, it would then add up the amount of time a person was actually working along with how much time their mind was occupied with work in one way or another. The end number represented a person’s free time. It was astonishingly low. Usually around 26 hours. In an article written up about an emergency room nurse from Nevada who frequently worked 12 hour shifts, her free time not working or thinking about work tallied as a mere 47 minutes. Several suicides occurred that went public. One man self immolated in his car in Florida after getting his results. One woman flung herself off a skyscraper in Chicago and killed a pedestrian in the process. An outcry came to ban the app. Because it generated its revenue through advertising for the base user or required a subscription fee for advanced metrics without advertising, millions of dollars were involved. Maybe billions. No ban ever came.
Aside from the average people monitoring work, there were the influencers who prided themselves on informing the world of their seemingly endless leisure time. “If you love your work then it’s all leisure,” the pop singer Ula Sky wrote. Soon someone hacked her app only to find she had spent over 60 days in the last year mired in court with 482 hours spent in the courtroom and countless hours spent contemplating her messy divorce, her X, her floundering career, and numerous other concerns unique to an influencer’s mind. Then there was a garbage man who worked 4 blocks from his job and spent and astonishingly low 53.2 hours a week working or even contemplating work. Even his time spent getting ready for work factored as family time and he’d often walk with his wife to work and rarely gave his job a second thought when he was not actively doing it.
One man, a Japanese fisherman, Hiroshi Tanaka, had no time that was considered work. He truly loved his job and the app sensed this and did not log his time fishing off the coast of Japan as work time. After his metrics went public he threw his smartwatch into the Sea of Okhotsk off Hokkaido Island and refused even a single interview. A week later his boat was capsized by pushy reporters who got too close one day and he needed to be rescued after having almost drowned while trying to save his fishing boat. The government of Japan provided him with a new boat weeks later.
A young pornstar, Quinn Quiver, logged over 14 hours of active sexual intercourse in one week. A morbidly obese man, Eugene Clark, spent 47 hours per week eating or in activities directly related to eating such as shopping for food or ordering food. Some anonymous person logged more than 78 hours committing crimes or robbing people. One man had obsessive thoughts related to the political party he opposed for 98 hours. A teen girl spent 43.6 hours daydreaming of a pop singer—Ricky Nova. One remote tech worker only logged 12.2 hours in one week actually working despite having invoiced his job for over 57 hours. That individual was eventually fired. There were lawsuits too. It got messy fast.
People started hacking the app too. How many times someone’s eyes blinked. How many sneezes. How many…well you can see where this is going. And it’s still going.
It’s odd. This simple app has done something. People quit jobs, left spouses, ended friendships, fled countries, and in one case so far, even retreated into the woods of the Pacific Northwest never to be seen again. This app is letting us see what we are spending our time on and in many cases, we don’t like it. It’s ironic how an app birthed from the very device that has been endlessly maligned for sucking our time has now finally jolted many of us into a state of self reflection and we are not enjoying what we see.
