A while ago I quantified how I spent my day. Every. Single. Minute.
A good day was about 6hr out of 8hr of work. The other 2hr was spent fluffing about - having coffee, hallway conversations, reading HN. Some of it valuable, but not totally focussed.
Then I had a kid.
Never been so focussed at work before. Easy to ignore all the noise, and easy to concentrate on whatever tasks come up during the day. I've found similar traits in other parents.
P.S. Not recommending you have a kid to solve your Deep Work problem, because they ruin all ability to concentrate _outside_ of work.
Good coincidence seeing this here, as my partner and I are about to play a game while our baby (hopefully!) takes a nap. We call it our 'team bonding activity'.
It really depends on how big of a hackathon you are running. In the previous year I have organised one ~50 person hackathon, and one ~200 person (part of a larger 1500 person event). Vastly different logistics.
Have a read of the Hack Day Manifesto, as it will probably trigger at least one 'aha!' moment of something you forgot: http://hackdaymanifesto.com/
This was an interesting way to visualise the arms database.
Some patterns are interesting:
What appears to be almost 50% of Russia's exports go to India, while what appears to be almost 90% of China's exports go to the countries surrounding India (Pakistan, Bangladesh, and a Myanmar).
I have been pondering the op's question for over two years, and this is the route I will probably take. Some websites like TicTrac do a reasonably good job at aggregating your stats from the web, but, like the op's example of electricity, will obviously never be able to query every service.
Much of my quantifiable data is sent to Google's Fusion Table, but I do not feel this is a good long term solution.
My intention is to define a base set of criteria for how a certain database needs to be formatted, similar to another comment here, and then let anybody make their tools available as either for "collection" of "visulisation/analysis". As long as some core fields are standardised, e.g. "quantity" and "date", then the data can be easily analysed. Each individual would control their own database, either on their own host or as a DBaaS, but tools to collect and visualize data could be shared.
I am leaning towards a document store (e.g. CouchDB and Cloudant), as that would allow any tool to push data in without knowledge of the schema. One of the nice things about some of the DBaaS is you can easily create individual username/password or API keys with specific permissions, so a third-party tool could write records, but not necessarily read any of your data. A standardised database would also benefit by having other tools able to utilised it, unlike something like Google's Cloud Datastore (which I do like!) In particular, I am thinking about the CouchDB and ElasticSearch integration.
So, why not just wait for apps like TicTrac or Saga to support every service? I have two reasons. Firstly, many of the other tools to aggregate data seem to have gone out of business. Secondly, there are some services I do not like to give third parties access to; email is one example, as is the ability to log keystrokes on my computer. However, I would like to see the summarised data from these services recorded with the rest of my Little Data.
Another option would be to dump everything to text files and upload them to Google's BigQuery, but I am leaning towards a shared tools / individual database model, as it would probably encourage better collaboration with other people.
Agreed. The natural first response is to play politics (not always bad) and escalate via some other back channel, but often times direct confrontation in the right setting is more effective.
To get into the mindset of the managers, consider skimming James Collins' book "Good to Great". One point to take away is that any leaders in your organisation will appreciate the brutal facts.
Make sure you have documented what issues and risks you have expressed to the PM and Lead Developer - maybe actually in whatever tool you are using, or at least in email. Make a record that team's morale is decreasing.
You and each of your team members should directly be telling the PM and Lead Developer that you are worried with specific risks or issues.
Take the registers to somebody with more authority in your organisation. Come in with a few recommendations. Present the facts and tell them you think there's a problem, and ask if they agree or not. If they do agree, make sure to get what the next action will be.
I really like IFTTT. None of my recipes are really all that clever, but they save me money and time, which is why I like IFTTT.
I have about 10 recipes searching classified or bargain sites for various things I intend to buy, but don't need urgently, and get an alert sent to Pushover when matches are found. The sites do not allow you to search and email results, but you can search and generate an RSS feed.
After Google Reader was announced as shutting down I made recipes for my favourite sites and push the articles to Pocket. Offline articles ready to go every morning.
And then there's all the Ingress passcodes I get automatically forwarded to Pushover...