Tesco – the company that runs a chain of grocery stores across Great Britain – uses digital armbands to track the performance of its warehouse staff.

A former Tesco employee told The Independent newspaper that the armbands provide a score of 100 if a task is completed within a given time frame, but a score of 200 if it's completed twice that fast. "The guys who made the scores were sweating buckets and throwing stuff around the place," he told the paper.

Tesco representatives said the devices allow users to switch into a "break mode" for up to 25 minutes a day. But that anonymous employee claimed that using the toilet without logging the trip as a break would result in a surprisingly low score, even if the task was finished within the allotted time.

>'If you can measure it, someone will, and that somebody should be you.' Chris Dancy

That's just one of the many ways that employers are using technology to track employee productivity. Call centers have long used metrics such as call time to rank employees, and gamification software may take it to new levels. Darpa wants to track soldiers' health. Apparently, IBM has a tool for detecting disgruntled employees. And Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has boasted of a "Chatterlytics" system for ranking employees on their use of the company's internal social network.

Our work is being re-quantified – in a big way – and Chris Dancy, a director in the office of the chief technology officer at BMC Software, thinks it's time for employees to take these metrics into their own hands. "If you can measure it, someone will," he says, "and that somebody should be you."

Dancy is connected to at least three sensors all day, every day. Sometimes, it's as much as five. They measure his pulse, his REM sleep, his skin temperature, and more. He also has sensors all over his house. There's even one on his toilet so he can look for correlations between his bathroom habits and his sleep patterns.

He's on the cutting edge of the "quantified self" movement kickstarted by *Wired'*s Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly. But it's not just his body and environment that Dancy tracks. He constantly takes screenshots of his work, and everything he does – every meeting, every document he creates, every Tweet he sends, every file he shares, every screenshot he takes – is logged in Google Calendar, providing him with a timeline and his entire work life. If you ask him what he did on a particular day, he can tell you with great precision.

And he thinks every white collar worker will need to adopt a similar regimen soon.

Dancy automatically logs everything he does into a Google Calendar, providing him with a timeline of his accomplishments.

The Workplace Apocalypse

Dancy – who has worked for years managing the information technology, or IT, help desks inside big companies – had an epiphany about four years ago when his company was acquired and he was laid off. That made him start thinking about how the IT industry was changing. "I didn't think I had a chance of being employable in 2015," he says.

He thinks the "consumerization" of business IT – where employees bring their own devices to work and just start using hardware and software without the approval of IT workers like himself – is radically changing the way companies operate. As workers choose their own tools – and seek support for them outside the walls of IT – the role of IT can't help but change. And the workers who have spent the past few decades supporting legacy systems are going to have to find work in this new world.

But it's not just IT workers who face an uncertain future. A turbulent economy and decades of downsizing, outsourcing, and automation have made employment precarious for all types of white collar workers. Meanwhile, thanks to sites like LinkedIn and Klout, your reputation is inching further outside your control.

>'IT needs a new role – as a supporter and helper, rather than being in charge of all tech for the company.' Josh Bernoff

Dancy's not the only one worried about this. Back in 1997, Michael H. Goldhaber wrote an essay called "The Attention Economy and the Net." Among the problems Goldhaber identified was the "winner take all" nature of job competition and the need for workers of all types to distinguish themselves.

"You will either strive to achieve stardom through what you do in your current job directly - say by being a great editor, a great marketer of books, a very visible cover designer or something of the sort - or (and this is not an exclusive but an inclusive or) you will want to be as visible and indispensable a part of what I call the entourages of bigger stars, so that through them you can get indirect attention," he wrote.

In the 1999 Cluetrain Manifesto, writers Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger called for all employees to interact with customers on the internet and to take on an "aggressive devotion to making life better for customers," regardless of their role in a company.

More recently, analyst firms like Forrester have been saying that IT's role will change and that employees across the company will need to engage in social media. "IT departments no longer control the technology in companies – the employees are able to get access to it for their own projects, because it's so cheap and easy," Forrester senior vice president of idea development Josh Bernoff told ReadWriteWeb as far back as 2010. "So IT needs a new role – as a supporter and helper, rather than being in charge of all tech for the company."

Know Thyself

"I've always liked measuring myself," Dancy says. Dancy's father used to measure his sons growth by making marks on the wall every year. But Dancy wasn't satisfied to wait a year to see how much he'd grown, so he started measuring how tall he was getting on his own. In his 20s, he religiously tracked his finances and purchases. So online tracking came naturally.

The first aim, he says, was to get a real sense of what he was sharing online. "If Klout is going to try to measure you, you should at least try to measure yourself," he says. Then it progressed from there.

At the moment, he tracks everything he can, even if he doesn't see an immediate benefit, so long as it's relatively easy to collect – and he can save the data into Evernote, Google Calendar, and Excel. You never know when something seemingly pointless will come in handy in the future.

"If I'm on a call and my voice gets over 50 decibels, my phone notifies me," he says. "My heart rate after a conference call usually can give me better insight into the call and my feelings about the call."

He calls this "knowledge lockering." Dancy's original knowledge locker was an Outlook PST file. Now, using online tools like IFTTT and Zapier, he saves all the content he creates and every articles he reads in Evernote. He can then search all of that data through Google via the search engine's integration with Evernote.

>'If I'm on a call and my voice gets over 50 decibles, my phone notifies me," he says. "My heart rate after a conference call usually can give me better insight into the call and my feelings about the call.' Chris Dancy

Dancy also uses Memolane to track his online presence, but many tools exist, including the open source application ThinkUp. "Look honestly at how you live online, what you share, who you share it with and tighten it," he says. "Be mindful of when you're sharing stuff that you are creating a pattern that someone else is going to try to read. Don't share everything."

He says that while it's a good idea to be aware of which social networks people are using, you don't need to be a part of all of them. Trying to be in too many places dilutes your quality.

Sometimes, his online persona begins to feel like a "second self" or "augmented self," and he's careful to adjust his online presence so that it will positively influence his offline life. For example, he says, it was his online presence – and the audience he accumulated – that landed him his job at BMC.

Soon, Dancy says, companies will start tracking their employees in much the same way he tracks himself. They have no choice. "Enterprise needs new measurements of success for knowledge workers. Today's knowledge work is measured in really inappropriate ways," he says.

Dancy doesn't think that all tracking is necessarily positive, but he's fatalistic about the future. Even if workers reject more Orwellian surveillance from employers – or companies determine these measures to be counter productive – individual workers will likely use self-tracking to gain a competitive edge.

The trick is to temper it – somehow. "I said to myself: 'This could break a person.' Not only are you not supposed to be able to find this much stuff, you shouldn't be able to record this much stuff," he says. To cope with it, Dancy has taken up mindfulness meditation, a practice that is actually aided by the systems that he has in place – such as his records of when he gets excited during a conference call.

In the end, it's worth it. "I can look at some things as pure data," he says. "That dehumanizes me in some ways, but it also helps me detach and deal with difficult people. I used to be always thinking about what I was going to say next instead of listening to people."