Uh-oh. It May be Time for Me to Stop Using the Company Laptop.

The Wall Street Journal recently had a story about how more and more companies are using software to monitor its workers’ habits.

ActivTrak software can track “every little thing that happens on the computer from the time it’s fired up.”.

If you’re on ESPN for five minutes it knows.

It knows how much time you spend on Facebook. On Twitter. On YouTube.

The reason companies would install such software is to increase worker productivity.

For one company that installed ActiTrak, baseline productivity levels—measured as the amount of time employees spend on websites and apps classified as “productive”—have risen from about 60% to north of 85%. The company rarely uses the tool to discipline workers. Instead, it lets managers spot patterns and praise employees who go above and beyond by detecting, for example, workers who take their laptops home and work after hours. It also helps identify good candidates for promotion and learn more about how workloads tend to ebb and flow during the day.

Another company that installed the software discovered that employees typically worked just three hours out of each eight-hour day. Since employees became aware their activities were being tracked statistics have dramatically improved.  To encourage productivity, employees can log on to see their own productivity levels as well as that of their coworkers. The company has also set up alarms that pop up notices when workers go to sites like YouTube. In one of the company’s offices, screens display the names of the top 10 performers based on ActivTrak metrics. Not everybody was a fan of the new tracking system; seven out of about 150 quit.

I’d be scared and embarrassed to see how I spend some of my days.