computerwoche.de

Archiv

Save Your Team from Inefficiency With RescueTime

17.05.2012
Here's a question most of us can probably answer, at least approximately: How many hours do you spend in front of your computer every week? But here's a trickier one: How much of that time do you spend doing productive work, and how much of it do you spend watching cat videos? RescueTime ($9 per month) is an online service that tries to answer this question, and sometimes even succeeds.

To use RescueTime, you need to set up an account and install a tiny client application on your computer. The RescueTime client sits in the system tray (by the clock), and collects information about what you do with your computer. This information can include every window, every document, and every website you access--and it all gets reported to RescueTime for slicing and dicing. There is also an that links to your RescueTime account for tracking time not spent in front of the computer.

If you are uncomfortable with that level of detail, you can use the RescueTime Web interface to tell RescueTime not to collect window and document titles, not to collect website URLs, or not to collect email and webmail activity information.

You can also switch on a domain whitelist, so that RescueTime only tracks time you spend on a subset of specific websites. RescueTime also has a setting for ignoring adult websites. With this setting on, RescueTime ignores any adult-related websites you visit (as long as it recognizes them as such).

After you decide how much information RescueTime should receive, you can just sit back and use your computer as you normally do. RescueTime will sit quietly in the system tray, watch you, and report back to HQ. After a while, you can log into the RescueTime Web interface and look at the extensive dashboard outlining your work habits.

RescueTime works by classifying activities on a scale of -2 (very distracting) to +2 (very productive). It can guess how productive many activities are based on collective data from its user base. For example, it gave my YouTube browsing a -2 score without me having to tell it how distracting YouTube is for me. It doesn't recognize all activities, and you may need to tweak some of those it does recognize (for example, maybe you need YouTube for your work).