

RescueTime (YC W08) (finally) Releases Project Time Tracking - bfioca
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2009/11/13/rescuetime-for-project-time-tracking-finally/

======
DenisM
I was all very excited, but as it turned out the launch was clearly premature.

First off, the blog post does not link to pricing page or even the product
page.

Second, the price on the pricing page (which is here
<http://www.rescuetime.com/solo>) is not related to the prices you see when
you click through - some of them are much lower
(<https://www.rescuetime.com/signup/solo?plan_id=38>), some are higher
(<https://www.rescuetime.com/signup/solo?plan_id=29>) and some are in the
middle of the volume-discount table (<https://www.rescuetime.com/signup/pace>)
but not matching any particular price point. In addition, the first page does
not render correctly in firefox 3.5 on Mac OS.

Next, the ad copy at the bottom of the consumer plan page
(<https://www.rescuetime.com/solo>) extols virtues of business plans which was
very confusing.

I have sent an email about the preceding problems to tech support on Saturday
and received no reply yet.

So this all should have alarmed me, but the problem was so bad for me I rushed
in and punched my credit card number. What did I get?

The project tracking didn't work. I created project GeeTasks, specified
GeeTasks as a keywoard and starting browsing my site GeeTasks.com and using
XCode project GeeTasks to code my iPhone app GeeTasks (XCode displays the
project name in the title). None of that time was accounted for - my project
time is empty. I did get hour-by-hour accounting of what I did and there I
could see "XCode - GeeTasks" line for XCode, so data collector seems to work.

I have sent an email to tech support about that and received a reply that said
they are aware of the problem and working on it.

Last night, all tracking data has disappeared from my account. I have sent an
email to tech support and received no reply as of yet.

It doesn't help that Tony bragged about steaming full speed ahead without
doing backups: <http://twitter.com/webwright/status/5695689067> I don't care
how confident you are, please do backups on a regular schedule.

Lack of updates about mentioned problems from the blog or twitter is also not
encouraging.

~~~
webwright
The backup tweet was a joke-- Of COURSE we do backups. I just thought it was
funny that we were doing it on Friday the 13th. Good lord, man.

We probably should have set better expectations (maybe a beta label on every
new feature)-- we're a release-early-release-often shop. Jump into a new
feature on the DAY of the release, and you should expect bugs (potentially
show-stopping ones, but hopefully not). Jump into it in the first WEEK, and
we'll probably still be ironing out little wrinkles. Jump in next year and you
could STILL run into a snag-- we're happy to help;

Thanks for the thoroughness-- some of the above stuff is helpful (though I
tend to think that if that was your motivation you would've just emailed us).
I'm certainly sorry for any delay in response. On a weekend after a big
release we can sometimes fall behind a bit (the support team IS the dev team).

~~~
skmurphy
The challenge is that these new features drive a bill that your customer sends
to their customer. I am a little surprised by this response to problems that
could undermine your customer's business relationships.

I am also surprised that none of your current customers would give feedback or
comments on how the release worked for them: why not just deploy it to current
customers who want to use it (since it's appears to be free to them) and make
this announcement after you have had more than a week's testing? Or was that
also a joke?

You should consider appending the "jump" sentences (e.g. "jump into a new
feature...") to your announcement blog post so that new visitors are aware of
your approach to developing and delivering software.

~~~
webwright
Yaw, I agree in hindsight-- the language should have been more "beta-ey" to
warn off the risk-averse. We did have a small collection of private beta
users, FWIW. There are some scattered issues, but the release is pretty solid.

These new features CAN drive a bill (though most of the users were surveyed
who were interested in this feature were NOT billable folks, interestingly
enough). Given that the feature has existed for less than 1 business day, I
think the chance of undermining business relationships is pretty darn slim.

Did I do something to offend you, Sean? I can't QUITE tell if your comment is
snarky or not.

~~~
skmurphy
No snark, concern that your new application has more serious consequences of
failure: sending a client an inaccurate bill is much less recoverable than a
poor understanding of how I use my time.

------
DenisM
Apart from the launch problems how was the product?

It didn't show promise to me as it doesn't integrate into my work-flow. The
way I track my time is by recording the start time into a spreadsheet and then
the end time. Later I tally up the number and not only record how much time I
spent on project GeeTasks but also what work item I was doing. This is very
disciplining and should help me plan future work with greater accuracy. For
example, now I know that I spent 8.3 hours to localize my GeeTasks iPhone app
into the first foreign language, 8 hours for second two languages and 2 hours
for the fourth language - clearly I am getting better at this localization
thing. My biggest problem is that sometimes I get excited about a project and
dive in head-first without recording when I started on it. The end time is
usually clear from source control logs, emails etc. As a reuslt I feel uneasy
about accuracy of some of my project data and I feel it may taint all of it.
So I was very excited about prospect of autmotically tracking everything that
I did.

Alas, RescueTime doesn't seem to help with that - it records in a given hour
how much time was spent here or there. In other words it's too coarse for my
goals as it does not allow tracking workitems. Given that the project tracking
didn't work I could not evaluate the UI for it, but the regular tracking UI
was not quite what I wanted to see - summary display was too coarse while the
drill-down was too detailed with each few-second interval being reported.

~~~
diN0bot
i totally agree, though i'd phrase it as: RescueTime is too granular, whereas
i want something with low but abstract resolution.

i manually track every hour of my day into categories such as startup, sleep,
professional-fun, social, sports or waste.

1) some of these can't be tracked by computer usage; eg, sleep, social, sports
and unprofessional-fun which includes making music and reading books.

2) when i'm doing work i don't want to sift through which websites i'm
visiting. localhost:8000 could mean i'm doing startup work or i'm doing a
professional-fun side0project. i visit hundreds of online blogs and APIs for
help with coding, but i also procrastinate via hn.

i use iCal to mark my time and leave notes, though i can see using a
spreadsheet work as well if not tracking 100% of your time.

i wrote python scripts to analyze my iCal files and create weekly stats and
graphs:

<http://github.com/diN0bot/iCal-Analyzer>

~~~
DenisM
Yes, I do have a problem with not tracking 100% of my time. It started when I
still had a day job, so I was curious how much time per week I spent on my
startup (as it turned out 21 hours/week, 20 LOC/hour). It worked well back
then but now I need something more comprehensive to track all my time.

Oh wait, I figured it out! You know whats needed? I need a low-bandwidth
screen recorder that would run for the whole day. In the evening I would
replay it at 10x and see what I was doing and properly account for it. I'm off
to check if Camtasia or ScreenFlow can be coerced into low-fidelity...

~~~
diN0bot
ha, that's not bad, though it still has the problem of not accounting for: \-
non-computer time \- conceptual activities (eg, tabbing between Eclipse,
Terminal, Emacs and FF is all part of project A for these hours, and project B
for those hours)

i'd love to see a blog post or open source code if your project works out.
good luck.

edit: interesting you wanted to know time/wk and loc/hr

i'd be curious to know more metrics people are interested in.

personally, i like to see weekly deltas in addition to averages, as well as
ratios between categories. i'm still figuring out the sweet stuff, tho. for
instance, i haven't found "activity length" or "activity switching" useful,
but i keep thinking it might be meaningful.

finally, i sometimes also track my subjective states, eg satisfied, motivated,
anxious, down, tired. it would be interesting to detect patterns in both
activity and state and then see if they correlate. the ultimate goal is to
determine what i can do to promote good states or lessen down time.

i've worked on many projects in this area (mostly hobbies), including a full-
time startup right now, so if this is an area you're interested in working in
let me know.

~~~
DenisM
So the $100 Screenflow records screen at a rate of about 6.5 Mb/minute,
388Mb/hour or 4.6Gb for 12 hours. That's pretty good! There is no built-in way
to replay at 10x speed, at least not without exporting. However, I can
actually drag the slider along the timeline, so it's kind of manual playback.
It works!

I have already discovered that I spend 14 minutes banging out my previous
reply in this thread. No wonder I don't have any time!

------
tibbon
I'm checking out the product in a few minutes.

One thing I think that's missing from big-project tracking (and time tracking)
is Realtime. I'd love stuff to push ajaxwise into a page, even if I'm on it
already. I need to see what's happening now, just not when i refresh.

