Furthermore, RescueTime doesn’t track what I was writing, so to figure that out, I’d have to refer to some other Time Management System, which hurts it on the cohesiveness front. My academic writing has far more weight than my blog writing, though my actual habits may prove otherwise. That amounts to a lot of writing, and RescueTime has perfectly tracked that.īut it has tracked it as “writing.” The problem: not everything I write has the same productivity value. I’m even drafting my academic papers in Textmate. When I’m drafting blog posts, I do it in Textmate. When I visit another blog and start writing a longish comment, I pop open Textmate, do the writing, and then copy back to the site. It’s often the case that there is some tension between simplicity and usefulness, and RescueTime is a brilliant case in point. My major concern is how useful RescueTime is. But I do have some major concerns about the program… One Tag to Rule Them All I’ve already commented that RescueTime is simple and aesthetically very pleasing. (If none of this makes sense to you, read A Special Theory of Productivity for more information.) The functions of Time Management Systems are to help you Plan, Execute, and Evaluate your work, and the principles that make these systems better are Simplicity, Usefulness, Aesthetics, Connectedness, and Cohesiveness. My main critique about RescueTime is regarding its usefulness and cohesiveness.īefore I begin to evaluate it, remember the framework that I’m using to do so. You may be thinking that something’s gone awry, since I’ve both praised RescueTime and said that I don’t think it works as a time management solution. It simply provides the best looking graphs and charts that I have seen from any product in this niche. In conclusion, RescueTime is a free, easy to use time management system that displays beautiful reports of your activities that allow you to quickly evaluate your productivity. The last and probably most compelling feature of RescueTime is that it’s free! Yes, all of this time tracking and reporting goodness for free. RescueTime will also alert you when you have met goals that you have set – so, if you want to spend two hours writing a day, it will let you know via email, SMS, or RSS.Īll of these features are easy to set up and work as stated. writing, as an academic and as a blogger, is probably the most valuable thing I do, and internet surfing one of the least valuable – so that you have beautiful charts that show you how productive you are based on the value of the activities you’ve been doing. Other nifty reporting features include the ability to assign point values to activities – i.e. I’ll try to get that fixed, as the chart is informative). So, what happens to all that information? It is compiled and beautiful graphs are outputted that shows where you’ve been spending your time (much like the one the used above- update: I tried to embed a chart from my dashboard but I kept getting 404’s from RescueTime. For instance, if you visit this blog, you may tag it as “blog reading” and “personal development.” For the rest of the time that you run RescueTime, it’ll log time spent on this site as blog reading and personal development. The webpages you visit are handled much the same way. After you tag them, you’re done – from that point forward, RescueTime associates that program with that activity. You go in on your user Dashboard and tag the programs with the type of activity that you do with the reported programs. Here’s how it works: RescueTime installs a orogram on your computer and monitors the programs you use and updates those with an online server. (Tony: thanks for visiting and leaving the comment – I intend this to be an extended reply to you. But we don’t have a ton to offer to get you fixed up! Right now, we’re (RescueTime) the time management equivalent of a cholesterol test – we can tell you you’re not quite healthy and we can let you know when you’re making progress. You install a doohicky on your computer and we magically track all of your time usage. One of the coolest things about RescueTime is that there is NO DATA ENTRY. RescueTime is a web-based time-management tool that allows you to easily understand how you spend your time. I’ll give two explanations, one from the company site, and one from Tony Wright, co-founder of RescueTime. That’s too broad and unhelpful of a statement, so I’ll spend some time reviewing RescueTime so you can see how I came to that conclusion. In A Special Theory of Productivity, I mentioned that I that I didn’t think RescueTime worked as a time management solution.
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