TechTips Vol IV Software – RescueTime
Are you defined by your Actions? Who are you, if not for what you do? Find out a little about yourself by tracking your productivity..
This month’s software is RescueTime
RescueTime is a free time management software tracker that monitors your computer usage; programs used, websites browsed, time on each, etc. It accumulates this data into charts, graphs, and other data aggregators. Using this data you can hold yourself accountable to your productivity.
You can view summary, productivity by day, how much time you spent on each program and specific website, etc (In the free version you can only go back 3 wks worth of data). RescueTime breaks up your applications into categories, System Ops, Accounting, Software Development, etc. It also compares your data to the aggregate of other RescueTime users, for no other than to keep score :)..
The next time you ask yourself, where did my day go, you can quantify it…
Some Key FAQ’s from RescueTime’s Site
How much data does RescueTime collect? I’m a little worried about this. RescueTime collects the following pieces of information by default: application name, web site URL (if the app is a browser), start time, end time, OS username, and computer name. You can choose to limit what RescueTime collects by turning off window title collection, and turning off full URL collection (example.com vs. example.com/morewords). You can also elect to enable our whitelist functionality, which allows you to track ONLY web sites that you want to track– all other web usage is sent to us with no URL information.
Why should a business choose to use RescueTime? How your business spends time (and how that changes over time) is critical business intelligence– it’s that simple. Everyone’s #1 job as a knowledge worker is to look busy. When teams get bigger than a few people, a managers loses the ability to understand who is engaged and busy. And, as variables in the workplace change (from office layout, team composition, team size, and more), it’s really hard to measure changes in productivity over time. For businesses that choose to use RescueTime “in the open”, it creates an unrivaled culture of workplace transparency by eliminating much the posturing, deception, and resentment that tends to be common in the modern office