How we use RescueTime, at RescueTime.

May 12, 2012 — Robby Macdonell

We built RescueTime because we thought it should be easier to make sure we’re spending our time the way we want to. It has opened up a whole new world of data for us, and we wanted to share some of the ways we make use of it around the office.

Forming a baseline lets us read the pulse of our team at a glance.

RescueTime lets us see how much time we’re spending on the computer, without having to keep time sheets or manual logs. By categorizing different applications and websites, we can get a pretty good sense of how much time we’re spending on productive stuff vs. unproductive stuff. That gets really cool when you have enough data for patterns to jump out. It also makes it really easy to see when something weird (not necessarily bad) happens.

Take the month of April, for example:

It’s clear that something is very different about the first week, and that it appears something odd happened on the last day of the month. Turns out two of us were out of town during the first week, and on the last day we were trying to make some end-of-the-month deadlines.

Working 9-5? Not us.

We completely got rid of having set working hours. After looking at a couple months of our data, we decided that 5 hours of productive time per day is a pretty good average. We set up an alert for RescueTime to let us know when we’ve reached that 5 hour mark, and use that instead of a set hourly schedule. This flexibility works out really well for us (especially considering we’re a semi-distributed team). We still make sure there are a few hours in the day that we’re all available at the same time, but aside from that it’s up to each person to decide when they want to work.

Meetings at exactly the right time.

We use RescueTime’s efficiency report and comparisons report to figure out what times we’re the most productive and then never schedule a meeting on top it. Since meetings can be a bit of a distraction anyways, we try to reserve meetings for the times of day when we’re already a little bit scattered to begin with.

Unfortunately, it’s not totally homogenous, some people are more focused in the mornings and others in the afternoon. Having that extra context is still a huge help, though. (For example, I won’t go near a meeting on Tuesday afternoons, which is when I’m the most focused.)

It’s not just for team-wide decisions, either.

Those are a few ways that RescueTime impacts our entire team. Individually, we use our RescueTime data in all sorts of ways. Here’s a few highlights:

Robby (Product Development / Design):

“I use the time reports along with some metrics from other systems to figure out how long it takes me to do certain things. For instance, I can pretty easily tell that I spend just over 11 minutes on each customer support request I deal with (on average). I’d really like to bring that number down, and its easier to do now that I have a visible baseline.”

Joe (CEO / does a little bit of everything):

“I find it invaluable being able to know how long I’ve been working on a specific task. By being able to search for an individual document, like “linux_extended_info_grabber_sqlite.cpp”, I can see that I spent 4 hours 16 minutes so far this week working on that coding that feature. In that same search, I can see how much time others in my group have spent on that same document. Being able to look back at this type of data is amazingly powerful for me. It helps me estimate times better, judge overall effort, and make better business decisions.”

Mark (Chief Architect):

“I find value in surprisingly specific ways. For example, sometimes I will compare time spent in terminal applications versus code editors, to confirm or dispute the emotional feeling that I’m dragging and thrashing due to too much incremental testing (evinced by excessive terminal / shell time). And, probably unlike others, I’ll sometimes respond to my communications / email category to being too little of my time, and force myself to re-engage some lagging communications efforts.”

Jason (Sales / Marketing)

“I love having the Offline time prompt. It is motivating to me to keep me working, and it allows me to enter valuable time spent on the phone or Skype with customers. By categorizing all of my time, even unproductive time, it provides me with a clear picture across the top on how I’m performing that day, versus my best day and how many hours a day I average.”

It’s probably worth noting that anything in this post could be applied in either a team setting or for a single individual.

How are you using RescueTime?

Posted in Data Hacking. Leave a Comment »

RescueTime ProTip: Blocking distracting websites with Focused Time!

May 5, 2012 — Robby Macdonell

To start Focused Time!:

  • Click (or right-click) the RescueTime icon in your system-tray (win) or menubar (os x)
  • Select “Get Focused!”
  • Enter a time period to focus for

Note: Focused Time! is only available to RescueTime Pro subscribers.

Ever have times when you need to hunker down and focus on something, but can’t seem to pry yourself away from online distractions? For our RescueTime Pro subscribers, we have a feature that can help with that. It’s called Focused Time! and here’s how it works:

You can select the period of time you want to get focused for, pick as little or as long as you’d like. We recommend short bursts of 20-30 minutes. Enough time to make some progress, but not too long that you’re locked in for hours and hours (taking breaks is good for your sanity!)

For the amount of time you select, all websites that you’ve visited in the past three months that have a productivity score of “very distracting” will be blocked. If you want to have a look at which sites would be blocked for you, check out your distracting activities page. If you see anything on that list that doesn’t seem like a site you want to block, you can simply change the productivity score to remove it from the block list. Over time, this list will grow, so if you just started using RescueTime, expect it to get more comprehensive as you log more time.

When is the best time to use Focused Time?

Obviously, any time you feel like you need to buckle down and focus is a good time to use Focused Time! Cramming for exams, working on a big deadline, etc… You can also get a sense of when you might be more prone to distractions by reviewing your efficiency report, and looking at the times of day when you are less productive. (Mid-mornings are when I have the hardest time with distractions.) You may also want to look at your productivity comparisons report to see what days you are more unproductive. Those times might be a good time to use Focused Time. Of course, it only makes sense for those times when you personally feel like distracting sites are actually a bad thing. It doesn’t make sense to try to have FocusedTime! on all the time.

Note: Focused Time! is only available for RescueTime Pro subscribers. If you have a free RescueTime subscription and would like to try out Focused Time!, you may upgrade your account on your account settings page.

Posted in feature. Tags: , , . 3 Comments »

New on RescueTime.com, Compare your most and least productive days

April 28, 2012 — Robby Macdonell

We’d like to introduce you to a new idea we’ve been playing around with for the past few weeks. We want to make RescueTime even easier for discovering interesting insights about your behavior. Today, we’re launching the first version of our comparisons dashboard. It’s a way to quickly understand the differences between your most productive days and your least productive days.

Essentially, it analyzes all the time you have logged over the last 60 days, then ranks your days by your productivity score and splits your time into the top and bottom 30%. Then it averages those buckets to form a composites of your average productive day, and your average unproductive day. You can use the tabs at the top of the report to toggle back and forth between the two states, and see how your activities change.

You can see it for yourself at www.rescuetime.com/comparisons and here’s a video explaining it:

A couple notes about this report: 

  • Because this report analyzes your past data, it’s only available to people that have logged been active RescueTime users for at least 30 days. If you have just recently signed up, you’ll have to build up a little more data before you can see it.
  • This report requires a modern browser. We’ve tested it on the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Older versions of Internet Explorer will be prompted to install the Google Chrome Frame plugin or upgrade their browser.

We’re pretty excited about it, and we hope you find it useful too. It’s just a first attempt, and we’ll be expanding and improving it over time. One thing we’re working hard on is a way to compare other metrics besides productivity. There are a LOT of possibilities there.

We’d love to get your feedback on this. Is the comparisons report useful for you? Did you learn anything surprising? Is there something else you’d like to see? What types of comparisons would you like to see?

Posted in feature. 8 Comments »

What can you learn about yourself from your email?

April 21, 2012 — Robby Macdonell

After people have used RescueTime for a while, one of the most common time-sinks they report is email. It often comes as a pretty big shock, people think they check email a few times a day, and have no clue how it ultimately ends up eating up 30-40% of their time. Since it can be such a black hole, it’s probably worth trying to understand that time a little bit better, right?

Earlier this week Romain Vialard, a Google Apps Script Top Contributor, released Gmail Meter, a Google Apps script that will scan your inbox and create a report showing a bunch of interesting insights. You can find out things like:

  • How many conversations (email threads) did you have last month?
  • What hours of the day are you most active in email?
  • What days of the week do you send or receive the most emails?
  • How long does it take you to respond?

And a whole bunch more.

The installation was a little weird (you have to create a Google Docs spreadsheet, then install the script into it), but once it was set up and generated the report, I immediately learned a bunch of things that I wasn’t aware of before.

For instance, I send the more emails on Monday and Friday by a large margin. That sort of makes sense, but my RescueTime data shows that I spend a pretty consistent amount of time in email every day during the work week. That begs the question “what am I doing in email Tuesday-Thursday that’s taking up so much time?” I also found that I can DRAMATICALLY reduce my incoming email volume if I just stop about 6 or 7 automated emails that quite honestly I don’t really have much use for. Bringing down the size of my inbox will hopefully lead to less time that I have to spend in it.

It’s something I’d personally like to dig quite a bit deeper on when I get some spare time. Stephen Wolfram did an exploration of more than 20 years of his email history, and it revealed some really interesting insights, not just about his communication patterns, but about his life in general.

Unfortunately, as the name implies, Gmail Meter only works with Gmail.

Have you used any tools to understand your email usage?

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , . 1 Comment »

What outside factors affect your productivity?

April 14, 2012 — Robby Macdonell

Around the RescueTime offices, we’ve been talking a lot lately about the external factors that influence your time on the computer. RescueTime is pretty good at helping you understand what you’ve been doing, but there’s a bit of a blank spot when it comes to the question “why were you doing it?”

Last week, I saw this tweet by one of our users:

A similar sentiment is echoed in this article from the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago, which poses questions like:

“Suppose they (workers) could tell how much an afternoon workout boosts their productivity, or how much a stressful meeting raises their heart rate.”

It got me thinking about all the different data streams that are currently piling up around our activities, and how there’s probably a ton of interesting information that jumps out if you can mash them all together. It’s getting easier and easier to amass these piles of data, but unfortunately they tend to be fairly siloed off. Here’s a few that seem really interesting to me:

Physical activity:

I’ve used a Fitbit to track more or less every step I’ve taken over the past 2 years (just about 6 million steps). Lately I’ve been using it to keep a really close eye on the time I spend sitting (turns out it’s WAY more than I’d like). I’ve noticed a somewhat counter-intuitive insight with my RescueTime data. I actually do more fulfilling work on days when I’m the most active.

Music:

I’ve tracked as much of my music listening history as possible since sometime in mid-2005. I haven’t gotten around to doing it yet, but I’d love to do some analysis and see how my activities impact my listening habits, of vice versa.

Sleep cycle:

There’s a bunch of devices that have come out recently to measure your sleep. Everything from free apps you can download on your phone to headbands that monitor your brainwaves. Personally, I use my Fitbit. It comes with a wrist-strap that you wear while you’re sleeping that measures your movement. I learned that I don’t really sleep as much as I’d like. I haven’t uncovered any unexpected insights about how that affects the rest of my behavior… yet.

Weather:

This one isn’t so much a personal data stream, but there’s ample data out there, and I think it’s pretty interesting. Especially living in Seattle with the long, dreary winters.

What data sources about yourself would you like to see mashed up? What do you think you would learn from it?

Posted in Uncategorized. 4 Comments »

Multitasking. Good or Bad?

March 30, 2012 — Robby Macdonell

One thing we’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately is multitasking and it’s effects on your productivity. There’s a fair bit of research that basically says that the human brain just isn’t terribly well optimized for doing more than one thing at the same time. Unfortunately, it’s often not something that seems like much of a choice. So many things have a “right now” urgency and seem to require immediate attention. Additionally, many people report that they feel more productive when doing several things at once.

We’re interested in figuring this out for ourselves, with our own data. We’re playing around with some different ways to look at RescueTime data to get a better handle on it, and we’re seeing some things that look pretty interesting. We’re still trying to figure out a “how much are you multitasking?” metric, but what we have so far suggests that every person on our team is significantly more productive when they focus more on a single task, rather than trying to juggle. While we’re not quite ready to release anything yet, we do want to open up a discussion around it.

What do you think? Is multi-tasking an essential skill that today’s knowledge workers must master? Or is it just a way to feel busier?

Posted in Uncategorized. 11 Comments »

Featured RescueTimer – Will Lam

March 27, 2012 — jasongrimes

We wanted to take this opportunity to start mentioning some of our more outspoken and exciting users and Will and RescueTime have been a match for years now. We sat down and asked him some questions about who he is and see if he can unlock any secrets to productivity and time saving for the rest of our community of users. So follow along for our Questions & Answers.

Featured RescueTimer

Q: Who are you?
A: I’m a coffee snob, personal data nerd, connector, Crossfit nut, and curator of the Toronto Startup Digest.

Q: What do you do?
A: I’m an Inbound Marketing Specialist at Powered by Search and just recently started blogging about one of my passions that ties data, personal analytics to personal development. :)

Q: How many hours of RescueTime do you have logged?
A: 5229 at the time of this email

Q: Which version of RescueTime are you using?
A: Latest versions on my Macbook Pro, Windows 7 (at work) and Android app.

Q: Why do you use RescueTime?
A: To find out how I’m spending my time.  I want to ensure how I’m spending my time is used wisely.  I pay you guys (Rescuetime) to make that happen.

Q: Everyone remembers their first computer – what was yours?
A: Ahh.. the memories.. Pentium 133 MHz, with a 2.1 GB Maxtor HDD, 16 MB of RAM, 16 x CD-ROM, 32-bit Soundblaster audiocard and a ATI 3D Xpression 2MB video card. It was the s*** back in the day :) (1996)

Q: Where did you go to College or High School? (if any)
A: Ryerson University, University of Toronto, Jarvis Collegiate Institute in Toronto, Canada

Q: What do you listen to while working?
A: Mostly stuff through Doubletwist on my Nexus S.  Other than that, I occasionally use Grooveshark.com.  Most played artists are Justice, Daft Punk, Kavinsky, Zero 7 and The xx

Q: Best advice to Get Shit Done
A: Timebox and attach a deadline to EVERYTHING.  I follow Parkinson’s Law and the 80/20 Principle religiously.  I’m really digging the Pomodoro technique nowadays.  I input all of my todo’s into GTD setup that consists of Due Today and Toodledo.com.  I also mix it with good old pen and paper where I write it down my Most Important Tasks (usually 3 and no more than that) on a Post-It Note.  Oh. And keep on hitting the Focus button via RescueTime :)

Q: What other services or applications are you using that you cannot live without?
A: Dropbox, Mint.com, ReadItLater, Daytum.com, Mindmeister, Pulse.me, DueToday/Toodledo, Fitocracy and even though it’s not a service or application – my Moleskine journal

Q: Is there anything else rad we should we should know about you.
A: In a previous lifetime, I was heavy into improvisational theatre but now I just appreciate the art form :)

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Posted in Uncategorized. 2 Comments »

New on Rescuetime.com. When are you in the zone?

January 30, 2012 — Robby Macdonell

Are you a morning person? More of a night owl? We just pushed out a nifty little thing that will help you figure it out.

For a while now, we’ve had the concept of an “efficiency score” in RescueTime. It’s basically how productive you are on a scale of 0-100%. That’s not too bad for giving you a rough sense of how productive you are overall, but it hides a few things that can be pretty insightful. We just pushed out a breakdown of your efficiency score over various time periods, so you can see when you are the most productive and when your periods of downtime tend to be.

You can see it on your dashboard and on the efficiency report page.

It’s not a huge change, but I’m pretty excited about it. It’s allowed me to learn some pretty interesting stuff about myself.

I feel like I’m fairly productive, but my overall score wasn’t really reflecting it.

Turns out, if you don’t count weekends and evenings, my productivity shoots way up. That’s perfectly fine by me, because that’s my downtime, when I don’t really need to be productive anyway.

I’m 14% more productive in the afternoons than I am in the mornings.

This is awesome data for me to know. I’m usually the last one to arrive in the mornings, and I always feel really guilty about it. Now I have some data that shows I make up for it in the afternoons. It’s also interesting because the rest of the team is on somewhat opposite schedules (they tend to be more productive in the mornings). So it means we’ll have to take than into consideration when scheduling meetings.


This is our first pass at making this information available. There are a few kinks here and there, but we’re going to be iterating on it in the near future. If there’s something that you’d like to see done differently, let us know.

p.s. to make room for this on your dashboard, we moved the comparison of your time vs. the average user. It can now be found on the full report.

Posted in feature, Product News, Uncategorized. Tags: . 5 Comments »

A New Report and Search / Key Word Filtering Improvements

January 19, 2012 — Mark Wolgemuth

tldr; We’ve added a “Activity Details” report, that presents your normal graph views of rank, over time, and productivity of all your “detailed” activities, or documents. This view is particularly useful combined with the Search word filtering tool, which now has improved results matching.

Search Improvements: Foundation for Our New Report

Our previously announced search improvements were primarily targeted at dramatic speed gains and increased reliability. As this new infrastructure stabilized, we took a careful look at how key word filtering was working for users, and considered the great feedback our users provided in conjunction with our own analysis. Then, over the last few weeks, we’ve been tuning how we can better and more intuitively match against user’s requested search parameters– for example, if you are in Word and have a long file path for the current document you are editing, the ability to search by directory, filename, file type, application type, etc. We’ve arrived now at what seems like an effective general solution for smart indexing– but we will continue to examine the results and take feedback on how it can be further improved. All together, the much improved speed combined with the more accurate results provided us the opportunity to integrate a new report into our offering, one that makes keyword reports particularly useful for exploring how you spend your life on the computer.

A side note about terms: I use both the terms “search” and “key word filtering” due to the dual purposes of this capability. We find that predominantly users use this feature (and it’s persisted cousin, Custom Reports) for the purpose of generated reports filtered against desired match results: we call this use “key word filtering” because rather than trying to find something, you are trying to generate a filtered report with a sort of ad hoc grouping. However, users also sometimes use this feature simply to aggregate / locate time for a specific item: this is the “search” use. Finally, there is a semantic case to be made that, in general, web app users are more inclined to understand at first glance what goes in this field when it is labeled “Search”, despite that not really being its primary purpose.

A New Report: The Activity Details Report for Premium Users

A much asked for feature, our new Activity Details report provides an immediate view into the time you spend on your most urgent items, no matter what application or site you are on. If you are tracking your time in a project or for a customer, or want to understand, for example, how email time figures against your favorite design or engineering tool, this is a great resource. You can filter it with keywords to narrow down the view, and you’ll get reports that graph the top documents or pages, and a table that lets you see your app/site plus its documents. Critically, before it was impossible to see all the results of search filters in one view: you could never see matching documents/details from different apps and sites expanded together, and now you can. The old activity report is now called the Activity Summary report if you want a less noisy summary.

Navigation Changes: Integrating Search / Key Word Filtering into Regular Use

In conjunction with the above changes, we’ve rationalized how the site navigation responds to your searches and key word filtering. Again, this is an attempt to combine our own analysis with your feedback, and may be tweaked over time.

  • From any report view, a new search (as in, clicking the search button) lands you on the Activity Details page. This provides you with immediate feedback for quality of your search results. Non-premium users still land on the Activities Summary page.
  • Clicking search on the dashboard leaves you on the dashboard, with filtered results
  • Once a search is active, it becomes sticky: if you navigate to Time reports using the side navigation, or click the “view complete report” links on dashboard widgets, your current search filter is preserved
  • When viewing Activity reports, the search filter is preserved for Application or Site items linked in the table results. For example, if you search for keywords like “Seattle Atlanta”, you get a list of all apps and sites that have either of those words in their name or document details; if GMail was in the results, and you clicked the item “GMail” anywhere it occurs in the app/site column, you would get a report of all GMail items with the same keywords in its subjects and details.
  • To clear out a search filter from affecting your Time Report browsing, simply click “Clear Search Filter [x]” and your screen is reloaded with the filter applied, and it is removed from all navigation points.
  • Note: at this time links click *inside* the graphs themselves are not preserving the keywords, we’re continuing to explore sensible behavior for this case.

Thanks for your patience and feedback as we improve RescueTime!

Posted in Product News. Comments Off

Protip: Keeping track of “sometimes productive” sites…

January 6, 2012 — Robby Macdonell

One of our users just wrote in a feature request:

“…sometimes overall efficiency as measured between “productive” and “unproductive” applications/websites is a poor measure. For example I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia because I’m learning something useful for my job. I also spend a lot of time on Wikipedia because I wiki-walk out of curiosity wayyy off the beaten path that I should be on for work. I start out with finding a definition for a term I didn’t know, and I end up in quantum mechanics 3 hours later. There needs to be some sort of “distraction-checker” or a way to teach rescue time what’s related to the intended task, so you can stay on it, and know when you’re deviating from it.”

Which was echoed in a different context by another user:

“One example of this would be StackOverflow, which I visit often but reach in one of two ways: either I follow a link from Hacker News to a joke question, which is unproductive, or I follow a link from Google to a question pertaining to what I’m working on, which is productive.”

RescueTime currently doesn’t have any real way of understanding the context of your visit to a site. But these are legitimate points. Sometimes, a site can be both productive and a time-waster, depending on what the user is doing there. It would be great to understand when you’re throwing time away on these sites.

Here’s a partial solution that uses the current capabilities of RescueTime. It’s not perfect, but will help you at least get an understanding of how much time you spend on sites like these.

How to understand time spent in sites that are sometimes productive, but sometimes distracting as well.

NOTE: part of this solution relies on some features only available to RescueTime Pro users, but you should still be able to get some value out of it as a RescueTime Lite user.

Take a few sites that you find both productive and unproductive, depending on your context. For this example, I’m going to use Wikipedia and StackOverflow, because they were given in our users’ examples, and they share the same characteristic of “Places you can do research but you can also get sucked into for longer than you’d like”.

Step one: Go to your manage categories page (https://www.rescuetime.com/categories/manage) and create a new category in the “Reference & Learning” bucket. Call it something like “maybe distracting” and set it’s productivity level to something appropriate. I’m leaving mine at 1 because it’s sometimes productive, but not always”

Step two: Now, go to your activities page (https://www.rescuetime.com/browse/activities/by/rank/) and look for Wikipedia and StackOverflow. Add those to the new category you just created.

Step three: You should now have a category page you can go to to see how much time you are spending on those sites. You can click the “by day” tab to see a more granular view of how you might be getting carried away with those sites. You can even add the graph to your RescueTime dashboard so you can refer to it easily.

Step four (RescueTime Pro only): If you are a RescueTime Pro user, you can set an alert by going to https://www.rescuetime.com/alerts and clicking “add an alert”. Set it to alert you if you spend more than an hour per day on sites in the “Maybe distracting” category.

That way, you’ll get a little nudge when you’ve been on  these sites longer than you think you should in a given day. Sure, there will be some days that you are legitimately doing research for a long time, but a trick like this can help you understand your patterns and make adjustments where you feel they are needed.

It’s a little bit of up-front work, but hopefully will help you get a better handle on those sites that fall into a productivity grey area.

Posted in feature. Comments Off
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