“How much time do you spend blogging?” people often ask me.
“I don’t know,” I say. “A lot. Probably forty to sixty hours a week.” I’ve always wished I could provide a better answer to that question. Now I can.
During his recent “fireside chat” with Google, Tim Ferriss mentioned a new application he’s been using called RescueTime. He didn’t elaborate, only mentioning it in an off-hand sort of way, but I was intrigued.
It turns out that RescueTime is a tool to measure how you’re spending your time on the computer. It’s simple to use. To get started you simply:
- Download and install a small application on your local computer(s).
- Establish an account at the RescueTime web site.
- Work as normal.
RescueTime works in the background, tracking the applications you use and the web sites you visit. Every twenty minutes, it sends this information to the web. Whenever you’re curious, you can visit the RescueTime dashboard to find out how you’ve been spending your time. For example, here’s a pair of graphs taken near the end of my first day using the software:
Yesterday I spend nine hours and nine minutes on the computer. That’s too much. But that’s also the point — I didn’t have a good sense for how long I spent online. RescueTime gives me concrete information about my productivity.
RescueTime also provides a chart of my most-frequenlty used apps and sites. Yesterday, I spent about 3-1/2 hours in BBEdit, my text editor, most of which was spent on the Robert Kiyosaki piece. I also spent an hour answering e-mail, and an hour handling miscellaneous tasks at Get Rich Slowly. More data is available in other reports.
RescueTime encourages users to “tag” each site or application with terms such as “work, personal, writing, goofing around” and so on. After you’ve tagged an item, you can set goals and alerts. You might, for example, set a goal to spend less than an hour a day reading blogs. Or maybe you want to spend at least four hours a day on work-related projects.
I’m only just beginning to use RescueTime, but I love it. It has the potential to revolutionize the way I work. Just knowing how much time I’m spending at various sites and tasks makes a difference.
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Do you have to leave the app open in order for it to track your time?
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That’s great, I need to get one into time management a little bit more. It seems like I never have enough time in the day.
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That is the coolest thing. I need to download that and start using it right away. I so often lose track of time when I’m on the net and look up and hours have passed by. This will help me better track my usage and efficiency.
Thanks for the tip.
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http://armedforcesadvantage.com
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Beware of software that totals you internet use. As it is keeping track of that information for you, it might be sending it to someone else.
If privacy is a concern of yours, just use the internet less. If you think you are surfing too much, you probably are and don’t need something to tell you that.
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I just downloaded it. Having a look at the website it seems like a nice idea.
I like how you can check on your data by day, week, month, year or forever. This is either going to show me how productive I am or how much I goof off.
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Pieter, yes you need to leave it open for it to track your time. Also, Steve’s right — if you’re concerned about privacy, this is not the app for you. RescueTime doesn’t explicitly do anything nefarious, but you *are* sending your usage data across the net. Just be aware of that. Here’s their privacy policy.
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Thanks for posting this! I’ve been wanting something like this for while.
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just saw this on daily15.com a few days ago. Did you find out about it there or was that just a coincidence?
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What a cool tool; I can’t wait to try it out. Another option I’ve used in the past is David Seah’s Printable CEO Series:
http://davidseah.com/blog/the-printable-ceo-series/
His Emergent Task Timer (paper or local application that runs on your computer) can help you track where your time is going during the day in 15 minute increments. It might be an option for those of you concerned about privacy. The only downside is it doesn’t roll up the results so you can’t see you spent 10 hours in email during the week without adding up all of the little bubbles.
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One free timesaving device I use (also inspired by Ferris) is to read GRS (and track several other blogs)is the Google Reader. It works much the same way as bringing a shopping list to the market; I only read what I am subscribed to. It saves me a lot of time having all of my subscriptions in one place. Setting one time a day to check for updates keeps me from wasting hours procrastinating on the web surfing.
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Very intriguing, in personal finance, the first step to success is tracking all your spending, I imagine the same applies to time management.
I have to check this out!
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I use pageaddict (http://pageaddict.com/), which just tracks internet usage (not general computer usage), and you can also tag the different sites to see where you spend your time…and you can also set it to limit the time you spend on a certain site…when you reach your limit, the browser screen changes and says “get back to work!”
It works for me!
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JD-Cool application. A lot like what MS Money does for personal finances.
It probably wouldn’t work for me since I spend a lot of time away from the computer. I find daily prioritized tasks to work best. Between a good list and eliminating time drains, I’ve made major steps forward.
My biggest remaining time drain is reading blogs. Perhaps I should stop reading Get Rich Slowly……
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I would really like to try that. But I’m scared it’ll tell me that I’m spending too much time on useless stuff and trying to avoid the useful stuff. I know that’s true, I just don’t want to change right now.
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Very cool! I know that I can easily get sucked in on the ole internet. I’d like to be able to analyze exactly what I’m doing online!
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Interesting!
Have you come up with a strategy for how you might reduce some of the time you’re spending online? Assuming that’s what you want to do?
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Cool idea – I’ll have to check this out. Thanks for the tip! I’ve used Dave Seah’s online bubble timer, but inconsistently. I’ll take a closer look.
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I use LeechBlock to keep myself away from known time sinks. It can be set to block sites on certain days and times or according to how much time you’ve spent on them. Useful.
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Cool concept, but it sounds like too much of a security hole for me.
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That could be a really cool way of tracking your efficiency too, which I am a huge proponent of. This is like the first step of budgeting only we’re talking about where the time went and not the money.
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As i work on different computers is not very useful to me. Something web based maybe available? (and free)
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the 4th comment up there would be my big concern; it seems like just another way for someone to learn your clicking habits, thus providing them with easy (and cheap) market research.
But that’s the cynic/ conspiracy theorist in me talking.
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We’ve been using RescueTime at my office for a few months now. I love it. We were initially using Toggl to keep track of my department’s projects, but it didn’t make any sense that a project clocked at 3 hours would take the better part of four days to get done. Then we started using RescueTime in conjunction and it came clear that a lot of time was going towards emails, chatting with coworkers (via IM), fixing past projects, etc. The two together creates an awesome way to keep track of your day.
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I like the idea, particularly the goals and alerts capabilities. The security issue is not much of a concern to me, assuming I could turn it off if I really wanted to have something be “invisible.” Is that an option?
One wrinkle though is I tend to leave applications open and use them on and off throughout the day. It is less convenient to have one open only as long as I’m actively using it, then close it to switch to working in another app, etc. The same thing goes with websites – at any given time I have multiple browser tabs open, some of them might be open all day before I close the loop and complete the task associated with it. Would this app then say I was working 100 hours a day because I had ten things open for ten hours?
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I love RescueTime. Really has gone a long way toward keeping my focused and maintaining my priorities focused on those task that I really need to be spending time on. It was shocking once that I saw what I was doing and for how long.
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I’ve been using this for a couple of weeks now and I love it. It has helped me be more productive and work more efficiently too. I just found this post as I’m behind in my RSS feeds, but I had to jump in and post. To answer Jeremiah (#24) it only records you active screen so that if you have 2 or 3 or more programs open it only records 1.
One way I found to increase the accuracy of the reporting was to assign a particular website as “Meeting”, “Out of Office Business”, or even “Not At Computer” (for bathroom breaks, or other things) and I just click a bookmark that points to the particular page when I am leaving the computer – then when I get my report it is more accurate.
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