Thursday, October 11, 2007

RescueTime is in limited beta

I blogged a few months ago about RescueTime, "a free time management solution which allows productivity geeks to understand exactly how they spend their computer time." Like SlifeShare and Wakoopa, it records your system events and displays them in ways that you can analyze and share. It also allows you to free tag your apps, so you can group them by function (e.g., entertainment, office work). That's less useful these days, since I do most things in the browser window now, but still interesting. RescueTime and other web apps in this class have real potential for sharing team member status in distributed collaborative groups.

UPDATE: RescueTime does log domains as applications -- see comments.

2 comments:

Tony Wright said...

Hi Clay-

We agree that just tracking and tagging apps isn't very useful-- the browser is increasingly pretty much an operating system unto itself.

RescueTime, FWIW, actually tracks individual domains that you go to and treats them as apps. Interestingly enough, if you treat a domain as an APP, about 80% of our average user's "apps" are websites. I haven't yet done the analysis to see what percentage our average user's time is spent on websites, but I expect it will be pretty interesting.

Clay Spinuzzi said...

Outstanding! Thanks for correcting my error. This software has just become much more useful for me.