# I logged my cursor for a month and found a law from 1954

> 82,866,811 cursor samples in 32 days. The pointer sat still 91.9% of the time, then reproduced Fitts's law from 1954.

By Mayank Kumar Poddar · Published: 2026-08-09T12:49:00.000Z
Canonical: https://www.mynkpdr.in/posts/logged-my-cursor-for-a-month/

For 32 days I recorded where my mouse pointer was, 144 times a second. That's 82,866,811 samples, written by a small open-source tool I built called CursorTrack.

## What I found

- **91.9%** of the samples were the cursor standing perfectly still. Only 5,925,990 landed on a new pixel.
- In a month it travelled **11.91 km** and made **85,582** clicks.
- Working at 3 a.m. didn't make me clumsier. My path efficiency stayed flat all day.

## The surprise

In 1954, Paul Fitts showed that the time to reach a target grows with the logarithm of its distance. I never set out to test it, but my ordinary work reproduced it. Across about 60,000 clicks, every doubling of the distance cost roughly 61.5 milliseconds, with R² = 0.933.

![A chart of movement time against distance on a logarithmic scale. A blue density cloud rises to the right along an orange straight line, with large dots marking the average of each distance band.](./fitts.jpg)

## One more thing

Not everything worked. Touch capture produced zero taps because of a bug in my own tool, and I reported that in the story instead of hiding it. No screen contents or keystrokes were recorded, only pointer geometry.

[Open the interactive story](https://mynkpdr.github.io/datastories/cursortrack-month/) or [see CursorTrack on GitHub](https://github.com/mynkpdr/cursortrack).