RescueTime reports how much time applications are being used |
One trait shared in abundance by successful people is their ability to manage time. We’ve covered a few online tools here in the past that proport to watch what applications you’re using and show you the time. There’s a new one on the block called RescueTime (freeware Windows, Mac). I didn’t waste any time registering, downloading and trying out the Windows version on Vista.
Once the application is activated you must login with the email address and password used for registration. Now visit the RescueTime dashboard and the updates will start appearing within 30 minutes. If you grow impatient like I did, just right click on the red icon in the system tray, choose the “advanced” tab and click the button that says “Send Update Now” — if you see the response “Update successful” then you should be able to refresh the RT dashboard and see your stats.
Now you can begin tagging the applications you use. If an application hasn’t been used for at least five minutes then it won’t show in the RT tags page and RT recommends:
You should really only tag apps & sites that you’ve spent a lot of time with or that you’ll use again in the future.
Despite the RT message about applications , after an hour, I still didn’t see anything on my manage tags page. Maybe that takes more time ?
If there is no keyboard or mouse activity for two minutes, then RT goes to sleep and reports this downtime as “The Rest” on the dashboard. As for memory consumed, on Vista RT hovered around 10,000 K. By comparison Firefox is using between 75,000K and 250,000K.
If you want to take this further, I previewed pageaddict that monitors and reports back the time spent at individual websites. For a to-do list program previewed see Rough Underbelly. Another web-based timer previewed in the past here is SlimTimer. Project budgeting? See the post on Tickspot. Just checked and seems like all these competing services are running, so maybe there’s room for another.
I like the idea of a program that runs on the computer tracking, versus in the browser, and have mentioned ActiveTimer on the Mac several times in the past. I’m going to use RT for a little while and see how it goes.
I’m not sure what the business model is for RescueTime as I didn’t see any ads. I hope it’s not to hijack my search or browsing experience with advertising when/if they leave beta. At the official RT blog RT founder Tony Wright explains they’ve taken VC funding from YCombinator which gets them by for the “Winter 08″ season.
If you need help or answers about using RT, they use the third party service, getsatisfaction.com, which points out things like why they don’t have Linux support yet:
Our sincere hope is that some enterprising young linux geek out there will reach out to us with an interest in building a data collector. Our data collectors talk to a REST web service, so it wouldn’t be an overwhelming task for a sharp coder, and we’d be glad to offer a lot of support.
Why does the person in mind have to be a “young” Linux geek? Talk about stereotypes, sheesh. Seriously, looks like they are working on documenting an API so RT tracking functionality could be added elsewhere.
Did this post make you go hmm?
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Heya!
An old Linux geek will do the trick, too… I didn’t type that with a lot of thought– but I think I was probably figuring that younger guys have more times to dork around with pro-bono projects like this. It’d be interesting to know the mean/median age of open-source contributors– if it was on the young side, would I be guilty of stereotyping or generalizing?
Anyhoo, thanks for the great and thorough writeup!
By the by, we’ll be doing nothing nefarious on the business model front. We’re going to keep ads out of the mix and won’t be hijacking anyone’s computer/browser. We have two focuses in terms of revenue. We’ll never make anyone’s individual data public (with or without identifying information) but we DO think it’s interesting (and potentially valuable) to have a deep understanding on how people use their computers (on and off the web). We also hope to offer a team/group/premium version that can allow team members to see the aggregate behavior of their team (WITHOUT allowing people to see individual data of other people) and compare their own data with that aggregate.
The business model stuff can wait, however. Right now, our focus is making the individual offering we have a LOT better. The great news is that we’re literally getting hundreds feedback/suggestion emails from our users every week– with some great ideas. The next 3 months are going to show a ton of new features/improvements!
Comment by Tony Wright — December 10, 2007 @ 3:26 pm PST