

Recession-proof yourself (and your team) - boucher
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2008/10/08/recession-proof-yourself-and-your-team/ 

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rewind
I like the product and I know they're a YC company, but that was as close to a
flat-out sales pitch as I've seen posted here in a awhile. Not the end of the
world, but what was that REALLY saying other than RescueTime has a good ROI if
you pay for it? And "recession-proof"? Come on now...

~~~
bfioca
Yeah I'll cop to that - it is a bit sales-pitchy. We were just really
surprised by those figures, though, and I wanted to share them in a useful
way. Can you blame me? :)

~~~
rewind
I have no problem with the post itself; it's in your blog and it's totally
relevant to your company. I just don't think it added much value in this forum
without giving it context.

If the subject was "How to use real-world data to sell your startup's
products", the context would be totally appropriate because readers would have
a differnet mindset going in. Spin, baby, spin ;-)

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hugh
Would have been much more interesting if they had any tips other than "use our
product".

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johnrob
I sense an underlying assumption that time == productivity. This is probably
the case for some jobs, but definitely not all of them.

~~~
azanar
It strikes me as something that would be far more accurate in a job where a
predetermined set of steps are repeatedly performed, and the time taken for
each is known before hand.

For jobs where cognitive effort is the fuel behind productivity, measuring
such effort by time spent in a particular application or lines of code written
over a fixed period of time strike me as at best a middling approximation to
what is produced. The lines of code ,or the end artwork, or whatever creative
output you see may be the result of an rather involved and complicated thought
process. Sometimes I can spend hours banging my head against a problem, and
make very little progress on it. Sometimes a solution will come to me after I
focus on something else for a while and let my subconscious chew on the
problem. Sometimes solutions to a problem involve doing things that look to
most people like anything but productive work.

Honestly, I think you can gauge far more about your employees' productivity by
talking to them about what they are working on than you will by looking at
aggregates of a limited number of data points, and trying to get a numerical
representation of productivity based on that. You're likely to get a more
accurate and well-rounded idea of the employee's actual productivity, while at
the same time improving their morale, motivation and lessening to the feeling
that they are just another cog.

This is not to say RescueTime doesn't have value to the worker or the
employer. I think the value is far greater for the employer who trusts the
employee to manage their own productivity, perhaps recommending RescueTime to
help that along, than it is for an employer who imposes such a tool on their
employee as a mandatory productivity metric.

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gms
Does no one else find the idea of a company using this to monitor their
employees off-putting at best, and sinister at worst?

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toolong
tl;dr

