What on earth is this maddening chart you see above? Is it the result of some maddening particle collision at the LHC? The graph of the spread of a deadly virus?

Nope. It’s my workday use of my computer, as charted by IOGraph.

Each line is the movement of my mouse. Each dot is where I paused the mouse, with the size of the dot representing the length of the pause. White halos around black dots represent a pause with a click.

Looking at the graph, there are two interesting things you might notice.

The first is the largish, and mostly-obscured blob in the middle left. It’s kind-of hard to see, but look close. It’s the single, largest pause on there. There’s a really simple explanation for this: I was on my lunch break, and forgot to pause IOGraph.

The second is the incredibly dark area in the top right. These are all mouse movements to trigger a Mac OS X hot corner, and as you can see, I use my “spaces” hot corner a lot. It’s become such a staple on how I work, that I often find myself trying to trigger it in Windows, or on other people’s machines. I just like to organize my windows on different desktops, and resize them so they’re as big as they possibly can be. Then, instead of dragging files between windows, or ⌘⇥, or clicking on a dock icon, I just flick up to the top left, and click on the application I want to use (or pause for a second before dropping the file I was dragging). I find it to be incredibly organized and fast, allowing me to make the most out of the programs I use.

If you want to try IOGraph for yourself, you can download it from their website: iographica.com