RescueTime is My New Favorite Time Management Tool
by Frank Gilroy on March 11, 2008
in personal
RescueTime is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The site provides a utility that loads into your task bar and logs your computing activity to a website. You can then visit the site for a series of graphs depicting how you spend your time.
I don’t use this tool to strictly manage my time. I don’t much beleive in managing my time to that level of granularity. But the tool has definitely helped highlight how much time I spend doing things that aren’t “in-line” with my goals or philosophies.
Notice in the chart above, for example, that I spent over 12 hours in e-mail last week. That is terrible! I have to cut that down. That is time spent actively using an e-mail program by the way, it does not include idle time. How much time do you think you spend in e-mail?
For years, the RescueTime team has labored away in secret in the hope of destroying the sliced bread hegemony. We’re glad to have pulled it off!
Seriously, though– thanks for the love. We’ve got a long road ahead of us and many cool things yet to build!
Cheers, -Tony (RescueTime)
You can insert graphs directly from RescueTime, ya know ;) They have widgets ^.^
Last week I spent 38 hours in “communications” - this includes email (17), twitter (10), skype (7), LJ (1), myspace (1/2), facebook (1/2), etc…
Definitely have to fix this =P
Wow, the net is just so damn cool. I type up a review and in a few minutes one of the developers comments on my blog. Very groovy.
Trisha, I tried the widget thingy and had some trouble with Wordpress. Didn’t have enough energy to look into it further.
@Frank– do you know about Twitter’s track feature? It allows me to be a professional Twitter stalker. It’s kinda an undocumented feature– details here:
http://blog.twitter.com/2007/09/tracking-twitter.html
(I just wanted you to know in case you were worried that there was a RescueTime developer watching from inside your walls or something… ;-) )
I’m afraid to even think about how much time I spend on e-mail.
With apologies to Trish…
This one is scary, Frank. Very scary.
This is a great tool, but Im kind of scared to find out how much time I spend on e-mail. My husband always get frustrated with me when I spend more than 3 hours at a time on my gmail account Lol. Thanks for letting us know about this tool.
That is actually the problem of RescueTime Tony Wright…. Privacy… Any plans of creating an offline version?
Look at the untagged time. Is that all you sleep?
Nice time management tool there. Most of the people who spend a lot of hours online, spend a lot of unproductive hours. I spend o lot of time on mails, chats and social communities but would like to cut up that time for something more useful. Will try this resource to see if I can use it to help me.