How to track your and your employee’s time use once and for all: Rescuetime
Monday, October 15th, 2007You know you’re wasting to much time surfing facebook, reading articles on digg and looking at your stats? Want to use your time more efficiently?
Well looks like Tony Wright, founder of Jobby (sold to jobster.com), has come up with a great software to do measure your activities, at least those that you with your computer. The software has the promising name Rescuetime.
It’s a hybrid web app with a small software for your windows or mac (no linux version yet) that tracks your active window every 5 seconds. The data is then uploaded every 30 minutes to the rescuetime webserver (both time settings can be changed according to your needs). Online you are then able to see which websites and which software you’ve been using for how long. On top of that, you can tag the websites / programs with your personalized tags, i.e. communication for your email, IM, and social networks. This allows you to see very quickly where you spend the most of your time, and again can help you set goals to reach certain work / waste ratios.
The GUI of the software is already great and I can already see Rescuetime become one of my new time wasters, due to it’s addictive character.
On top of that, they announced exciting new features yet to come:
- The ability to set time management goals (daily or weekly) and receive notification when you meet (or fail to meet) your goals (coming soon!)
- Tools to see how you compare to other people in your industry (coming soon!)
- RescueTime Pro. This will be our premium offering, designed for businesses and teams that want to enhance their productivity with RescueTime.
- Create private groups that are as big or as small as you want… A company could have a group for all employees as well as groups by department.
- Compare how you spend your time with other people on your team.
- View the aggregate data of the group over time (is your team getting overrun with meetings? Buried in email? Now you’ll have proof!)
- An API for facebook integration, netvibes modules etc.
Rescuetime is still in private beta, but invites are being sent out every day, so I suggest you sign up for the invite list if you are interested in testing Rescuetime.
Overall, I can say that Rescuetime is a very cool software with great potential. I am recommending it to my business partners and friends and I’ll definitely be using it myself: I can already see it making me more productive since a report about my activities is being sent to my hyperproductive friend, who will not hesitate to scold me when necessary.
