RescueTime: Time sink or savior
Posted by Jered | Filed under Choice, Craphack
I stumbled upon Rescue Time, an app that lives on your computer and continually monitors what you do. This monitoring is sent back to a Web site where you can see how much time you spent on a given task, say, filling out that TPS report or surfing Wikipedia.
Rescue Time allows you to rate each activity you do on a scale from -2 to +2, setting how productive each task is. Surfing wikipedia is a -2 in my book, checking my email (as little as I might) is a +2. Rescue Time records only the “active” application, meaning if you have multiple applications open, it will not add time for each application open, only the one you are working on.
This productivity tallying is shown off in pretty charts and graphs allow you to see over time what you are spending wasting time on. But this comes with a price.
Having Rescue Time installed at work and at home really makes giving each Web site I visit a score difficult. The scores are needed in order to show your Efficiency and Productivity quotients. But the time it takes to classify, tag and score each Web site I visit, could be enormous.
So does Rescue Time define the term craphack?
Yes and no, if you plan on living and dying by Rescue Time, you are most certainly going to become tied up in the management, but if you use it as a background tool, checking in occasionally, noticing how much time you have spent on digg or wikipedia, it may be a refresh to get back to work.
Tags: Craphack, measure, measurement, rescue time, time, tracking
