

See How Much Time You Are Wasting With RescueTime - wave
http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/see-how-much-tme-you-are-wasting-with-rescuetime

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swombat
I haven't deleted my account, but I uninstalled the widget, for similar
reasons to arthurk, and something a little more critical.

No matter how accurate RescueTime might be, it can only tell me what I've done
after the fact (usually a week later when I check the report). As I wrote in
my blog post here: <http://inter-sections.net/2008/01/02/feedback> when
providing feedback, timeliness is very important. For an application trying to
stop me from procrastinating, I think the time to do so is _while I'm
procrastinating_ \- not a week later. A week later, the only effect is to make
me feel bad about it. It's a bit like getting a Vodafone phone bill for £200
for the month that ended 60 days ago. At that point you can't do anything
other than feel bad, it's far too late to correct the course.

Here's a constructive idea for the RescueTime team (which they may choose to
implement or not): add a feature that turns the RescueTime widget into a
little minder (trained on the data that you've fed it for so many months) that
can tell when I've wasted a lot of time on sites like YCNews or other random
sites _today_ , and pop up a little message pointing that out to make me feel
a little ashamed of it, so that it steers me back towards productivity
_before_ it is too late.

Now that would be something. And since RescueTime is integrated with a web
service, chances are you could get people to pay a nominal sum for that
service. If I tried it and it really was quite good at salvaging those odd
days, here or there, that I waste procrastinating, I would grudgingly but
willingly pay up to about $5/m for it.

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arthurk
I recently deleted my account because I don't think RescueTime can measure my
productivity.

The thing is that it tracks application names and not its content. For
example, If I used TextMate for 5 hours (which is in the "Dev-Tools" category
and set to be +2 productive) the app doesn't know for what I've used it. I
could've used TextMate to do something totally unproductive. Even when I use
TM for coding, how does the app know that I'm working on the project I should
be working on? I use TextMate for so many things, its impossible to track if
I'm using it productivly.

Same with websites, you can't tell the productivity of a domain if you don't
analysize the content. Is wikipedia productive? It depends on the article. IRC
and IM are also good examples. The app doesn't know if I'm using it to be
productive or just chatting.

Then there's iTunes. I often leave it open, dim the screen and do non-computer
stuff. After 500 hours of tracking, iTunes was my most "used" app because of
this. Oh, and I set it to be productive -2, so the webinterface showed that I
was very unproductive every month.

Even showing me how long I've used an app doesn't really increase my
productivity. Here's a quote from one of pg's essays (disconnecting
distraction):

"At first I tried rules. For example, I'd tell myself I was only going to use
the Internet twice a day. But these schemes never worked for long. Eventually
something would come up that required me to use it more than that. And then
I'd gradually slip back into my old ways."

Same happens when showing me that I've used application X for Y hours.
Shomething always comes up and I slip back.

Don't misunderstand this, I like the RescueTime guys and the work they've
done, it's just that the idea of tracking application names/website uri's
isn't perfect.

~~~
seano
The problem is that productivity is a function of both time and what useful
product was derived. RescueTime is using time to measure both. It has no
effective way to tell if anything worthwhile was produced. For example, the
statistic about users achieving an average 9% increase in productivity in 3
months actually means that they increased the proportion of time spent in
applications labeled productive by 9%, the assumption being that the two are
absolutely correlated.

