Technology Overload Roundtable (video from PBS) (RescueTime mentioned)

There’s a great roundtable discussion on “Technology Overload” on a recent PBS Mediashift show featuring Leif Hansen (follow him on Twitter here: @leifhansen). The whole show is 25 minutes, but if you skip to the second video section titled “Taking Breaks” at 2 min 30 sec there’s a nice mention of RescueTime by Leif (another panelist chimes in with “It’s brilliant!”).

Technology overload is something we here at RescueTime are acutely aware of.  Every day we’re being introduced to new products and new bits of information– all of these require time.  Purveyors of distraction and “info porn” (our affectionate name for news and blogs) are scientifically optimizing their sites to grab more of our time and attention and we’re all pretty ill-equipped to deal with it.  So how are people dealing with this kind of overload?  They’re working longer hours, catching up on weekends, and taking fewer vacations.

The Great RescueTime Work-From-Home Experiment of ‘09

telecommuteVirtual teams are increasingly popular.  One of the software companies I most admire has an entirely virtual company of over 40 people spread all over the world cranking out outstanding software.  Yet the concept is terrifying to a lot of managers.   Highlights of the big fears include:

  • Will productivity go down?  There are a lot of distractions at home and presumably the workplace is optimized for workplace productivity better than home, right?
  • Will we lose that intangible synergy that you get working in the same room with other folks?
  • Will I, as a manager, be able to have a sense of whether folks are working?  Of what they are working on?
  • Will we still feel like a team?

The RescueTime product team is a small one (5 people), but we think this is big enough to run an experiment… For this entire week, we’ll all be working from our homes.  Here are the questions we’ll be answering at the end of the week (many of them will have juicy data bits, thanks to RescueTime):

  • Do we end up spending more time in aggregate on our productive tasks?  In theory, having no commute, no walk to lunch, and no drive-by interruptions in the office wil actually result in more minutes spent doing actual product development (or more free time!).
  • Does communication time go up radically?  Without the ability to interrupt our teammates, we’ll have to resort to emailing and IMing.  How much time will this suck up?
  • Is our total work-day longer?  Are we replacing our commute times with computer time or free time?
  • Does our work day become more spread out?  Working from home presumably makes it easier to punt work when you hit a wall.  Does this happen?  If it does, do people make it up at other times during the day?
  • (Subjective) How does the change FEEL?  Do we feel less creative?  Collaborative? Connected?  Does it effect how much we like (or don’t like) our jobs?

Stay tuned– early next week I’ll be posting a graph-heavy post with the results!

Using the RescueTime Embed and Data API

share team status, show off top performers, and more

We’ve had substantial user interest in ways of sharing and re-using their RescueTime data. True to our principles of keep-it-simple, we’ve published a way to very easily and safely share views of your data. These features have been live for over a month now, and some of you have already found and done great things with them– thank you! Here I’d thought I’d outline the process and some example use cases to help undertand how you can take your data further.

Although sharing common underlying code, there are two different paths to API data, with two different intentions: embedding charts and raw data access.

Path 1: Super Easy! Embed a Chart

As you use our new, improved, faster, more flexible reports browser, when you come across a slicing and dicing you particularly like, just click the Embed button, found right under the chart. Grab the snippet, and stick it in your blog, or your intranet, or wherever you want to publish it. Note that you can put as many as you like on the same page. Some of our clients have built team dashboards on their corporate intranets where anyone can go to see the pulse of the organization. Some publish these on their websites to show off their performance. Some live blog examples include: www.tonywright.com, Chris Barrow’s Blog, TheG2.net Blog and node.to.

Behind the scenes, this sets up an access key for you and sets privileges on it: when you paste this snippet onto your blog or intranet, anyone trying to steal your info using this key can only get exactly what it already shows. Note that in the snippet you can tweak certain aspects of the chart.

Also note that while your report view in your browser is fixed to the date you are looking at it, your embedded chart will continue to update with whatever is current. The timeframe is saved– as in “a week” or “a day” but not the specific date.

Path 2: Get Funky With Your Data

We’ve released an API targeted a making it easier for users to obtain alternate perspectives on their data, or to re-use it in other applications in a programmatic way. The current interface offered is based around a read-only http query core that models your data in ways users are accustomed to from RescueTime’s existing report views. We’re working on some language-specific convenience wrappers around this query API, and the Python library is complete. Ruby, Java, and Javascript are in the plans.

The first step is to go to the “Embeds & Data API” link from the bottom of your logged in session. From there you can “Setup Data API” to create a key for raw data access. Instead of output being formatted for charts, instead you pick JSON or CSV output, which you can then parse and reformat however you please. You can also parameterize your requests to change what is returned, without needing new keys– you can change date, search key words, specific application names, among other things.

There is a security model around the key providing data scope control and access safety, based on the same key system used by embedding. In this case, a switch is flipped that allows parameterization– so it removes that “can only see what browse view saw” restriction that embed has. It is assumed you will keep these more privileged keys private. But you can always monitor traffic and disable a key if you believe someone is using it who shouldn’t be. You can also set basic network restrictions around the key, to lock it down to access for just your machines.

A Reference Implementation

You can see what we did with the API in our reference implementation hosted on Google’s Appengine. It uses all the aboved methods and API tools in one page. All of the code for it is available for download.

RescueTime for Project Time Tracking (coming soon, but we need your help!)

As we get ready to launch some really really cool tools that will allow to you to block the distracting parts of the web, some of our team is starting to look forward to our next major initiative…  Projects!

RescueTime does a great job of tracking time, but doesn’t really do a very good job of allowing you to bucket that time into projects.  This isn’t an easy problem– lots of time (like email and Google.com) is difficult to automagically bucket into projects.  But for all of the people who are laboring under the yoke of painstaking (yet still horribly subjective and inaccurate) timesheets, we’re hoping to be a solution.  And, of course, all of the managers who are trying to make sense of this timesheet data, we’re hoping to help you out as well!

So PLEASE- chip in with your thoughts.  You can weigh in here in the comments if you want, but (IF you are interested in RescueTime tracking time on projects), we’d love to have you fill out this super short survey:

Please click here to fill out the survey (it’ll just take a sec!)

You have our promise the it is (at worst) only moderately boring and will truly give you a hand in shaping the product to be what you want it to be.

Posted in Product News, Product Roadmap. Comments Off

Introducing: Business Engineering, the evolution of Business Intelligence

Define intelligence:

Intelligence is a characteristic of thinking, but it is also a thing to be acquired. This substance is different than information. Intelligence is information that has been discovered, processed, and presented in a way that encourages its other definition: disciplined, insightful thinking.

Define engineering:

Engineering is the deliberate, analytical, scientific application of intelligence to the design or modification of a system.

Business Engineering requires superior Business Intelligence

Most data floated as Business Intelligence is more accurately labeled business information. It becomes the substance Business Intelligence when superior tools expose patterns and trends that are actionable.

Business Engineering is the practice of managing decisions based on critical analysis of intelligence about internal and external factors influencing the business.

RescueTime allows businesses to tweak the previously hidden algorithms that drive productivity of workforces. Data is scientifically gathered, and innovatively processed and presented in real time.

Businesses can re-balance work loads, uncover inefficiencies, and identify stalled or unusually successful projects while they are happening. Smart managers can introduce a measure of science into management itself: easily visualized historical information exposes trends one week to the next. Try several workflow processes, prove which one works best for each team.

RescueTime OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Support

[Update: We've modified the link below to point to the current production release of RescueTime for OS X since it now supports both 10.5 and 10.6]

Hello intrepid OS X early adopters!  We’ve built a new version of RescueTime that is optimized for (and doesn’t crash or leak memory all over the place like the one that’s up on the download page right now) OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

You can get it here.

Please note that this build includes the FocusedTime beta features as well, which you can either try out for us or ignore if you’d rather just keep using RescueTime as you have been.

This is technically a beta version, as we just got our hands on 10.6 yesterday and haven’t tested it internally extensively yet, but it at least works much better than the existing version of RescueTime on Snow Leopard.

Send bugs or feedback to team at rescuetime dot com.

Call for FocusedTime Beta Testers

[Update: We have completed Beta testing this feature. Thanks go out to all of the people who helped by providing bug reports and a lot of really good suggestions. We gave out a number of Solo Pro upgrades. Keep an eye on our blog post for upcoming opportunities to get yours!]

As Tony pointed out in last week’s blog post, we are getting ready to roll out a feature that allows people to voluntarily turn off some of the distracting portions of the internet.

We’re looking for some people that would be interested in beta testing to help us tune this feature.

If you are interested in participating you can download the beta version of RescueTime from:

RescueTime Beta Installer For OS X

RescueTime Beta Installer for Windows

Browsers Supported:

  • Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari for Windows – Opera support will come later
  • Safari, WebKit, Firefox, and Minefield for OS X

As an extra incentive, we will be giving out a limited number of Solo Pro upgrades to beta testers that provide us will exceptional feedback and bug reports on the new feature.  Send bug reports and feedback to:  team AT rescuetime.com

Turning off the distracting parts of the Internet

[note: the features discussed below will be launching within a week or so.  Get started ASAP and, when the features go live, RescueTime will be much smarter about the stuff that's distracting you!]

We’re currently working on a feature that we’re really excited about and we’d love to get your feedback.

What it does is this:

1. In the menu of the installable part of RescueTime is an item that says, “Get Focused…”
2. It pops up a window that looks something like this:

focus2

For the duration that you enter, we’re going to turn off the bad/distracting parts of the internet.  You’ll be sent to a block page like this.  Your “get out of jail” cards include:

  • telling RescueTime that we’ve mistakenly categorized this site as distracting (we’re pretty good at defaults and you can edit your list, but a false positive is theoretically possible)
  • Doing a simple math problem.  Our goal here is to create just enough work to make you think about what you’re doing.
  • Force-quitting RescueTime.  The geeky among you realize that you can kill the process (though that’s a touch harder than the math problem.

So here’s the question for you– we’d love to hear back in the comments:  How sharp should the teeth be?  Ideally you’re focusing for short bursts (30-45 minutes) – should we let you out or force the commitment?

More details below if you’d like to hear more about our thinking on this feature.

Why Build this Feature

The web is getting scientific.  Specifically, it’s getting scientific about separating you from your time.  Entertainment and news sites are doing multi-variate testing trying to maximize the metrics that matter in their business.  That is: pageviews, time-on-page, and bounce-rate (a measure of whether you look at more than 1 page).  They’re getting good at these tests, and it’s costing us.  Even the best of us.  We’ve all experienced that moment where we look at the clock and realize, “Holy crap– I just spent 2 hours surfing when I really wanted to be getting things done!”.

A while back, we were inspired by a really cool app for the Mac called Freedom.  Basically, it allowed you to turn off the entire internet for a fixed period of time.  The only way to turn it back on again was fairly costly- a reboot.  Surely this was a great tool for short bursts of self-imposed focus!

But it didn’t take too many tries to realize that the internet is just too central to how we work.  Google Docs holds critical information that we need ready access to.  It’s nigh-impossible to code without access to the huge pile of debugging info and tutorials that Google search gives us access to.  Designing is crippled without the internet as well– stock image sites and color palette inspiration sites are a big part of our design process and we can’t get quick feedback on a design direction if we can’t post it to Skitch and IM the team a link.  We needed something that only turned off that distracting bits of the internet.

So we moved on and tried LeechBlock, a nifty Firefox plugin that allows voluntary blocking.  But we quickly ran into painful limitations here as well.  The distracting swaths of the web are vast– Leechblock allowed you to create a list of distracting domains, but www.facebook.com doesn’t catch 3rd level domains like app.facebook.com.  And a friend can IM you a link to a funny website that you’ve never been to (and might never go back to) which can be a huge distraction.  Managing that list is imperfect and time consuming.  And, of course, Firefox isn’t as big a part of our browsing lives as it once was.  Many of us use Safari or Chrome.  And, from a product design point of view, it’s hard to ignore that a big mess of people still use IE.  A solution that enforces across all browsers seems critical for something like this.

So, as of now we’re internally testing the “Get Focused” option and loving it.  We don’t have to build lists of distracting sites, it works in any browser, and it has enough “teeth” to keep us honest without actually locking us in a closet.  What do you think?

Your Efficiency Scores may have changed!

Just a quick newsflash for those keeping score at home.  Individual users of RescueTime may have their score look very different as of this release.  The reason for this that previously, you probably had much of your data untagged and unscored.  Also, RescueTime didn’t do a fabulous job of making sure all of the many sites people visit every day had categories and scores– so these didn’t really effect your scores.  So what’s likely happening is that lots of “surfing” time (which was previously not effecting your efficiency because RescueTime wasn’t smart enough to assign it a default score) was not hurting your score.

All that being said, assigning default scores is HARD– everyone is different.  For me, email is a sorta-productive necessary evil and IM is the devil.  You might work differently.  While we’ve done the best we can with default scores/categories, you should feel free to override them based on your workstyle.

Quickest way to do this is:

Go to the new Manage Categories Settings Page.  Here you’ll see a bunch of boxes that look like this:

z1

You can mouse over each of the categories to see an edit button, where you can change the default score (-2 is bad, +2 is good) to better fit your style.

If you find that a lot of your time is uncategorized, you can go to the list of all uncategorized activities and spend a minute or two categorizing the big ones.

And, finally, you can check out your top activities in a list ranked by how much time you spent on them.  It’s a good idea to glance down this list to see if the scores are appropriate.  As with all things, don’t go crazy here– once you find yourself scoring sites that you visited for only a few minutes in the month, it’s probably time to say, “good enough!”.

The exciting thing about the new release is that everyone’s scores and categories contribute to everyone else– so as people categorize and score sites, that means you’ll get democratic “defaults” and won’t have to spend time monkeying with your data in RescueTime (making us all more productive!).

Major Release: Time to Put out some Fires!

v_1

I remember seeing this little gem on Twitter many months ago and @inem recent retweeted it.  The original fellow probably had no idea how much it’s been a call to action for us!

We’re incredibly excited to announce that we’re ready to start putting out some fires and that individuals and teams can now choose to make RescueTime a bit more of a harsh mistress.  This is a huge release for us, so I’ll start with a quick summary list of what’s in the release and then I’ll add a list of screenshots to illustrate some of the fabulous stuff in this release.

The Big List of What’s New

  • We now have near real-time alerts– right on your Desktop. Set a limit of how much time you want to spend on a particular activity and RescueTime can instantly nudge you when you exceed that limit (we’ll even tell you how much your average coworker is spending on that activity).  This is our first step at giving you the option to make RescueTime a “harsh mistress”.  We often liken the power of RescueTime to the ability to look at how you spend money with apps like Mint or Quicken.  Now imagine if Mint could send you a quick text message RIGHT BEFORE you’re about to spend money at a place you’re trying to avoid spending too much money in! (note: this is a premium feature)
  • Tags are officially gone. We broke down our reasoning here if you’re curious.
  • SEARCH. Now that RescueTime has the option of tracking documents within many applications, getting at the data you care about has gotten more challenging.  Now you can just type in an application name, document name, or site name in the search box.  In times past, if you wanted to know how much time you spent on Google related activities, you had to tag everything googly and then look at that report (dozens of clicks!).  Now you could just type “google” into the search box to get a report for anything matching that in the URL.
  • Graph Widgets for your site/blog/favorite dashboard. Every single RescueTime time data graph can be embedded into any HTML page that allows you to drop in a JavaScript snippet.  Are you worried about people getting buried in email?  Embed the email graph onto your company’s internal blog/wiki to keep people aware of email.  Making a public commitment to reduce your Twitter addiction?  Add your Twitter graph to your blog to hold yourself accountable!
  • A brand new categorization system. Previously, categories were a bit sparse and sometimes maddeningly hard to use.  We’ve refreshed our categories (with a nested category system) and have made the user experience for adding/editing categories worlds easier.
  • Great default categories and scores.  Much of the value of RescueTime really only manifested when you took the time to label and rank things– which is a timesink (ironic, no?).  Henceforth, all apps and sites will be categorized and scored based on the majority “vote” (you can always override it).  This removes most of the ongoing burden and makes the lives of our new users much easier.  Rejoice!
  • Numerous UI/UX improvements. We pored over all of the feedback we’ve gotten over the past months and attacked all of the confusing bits that we could find.

Release Screenshots

v_3


v_2
A new report!  A breakdown of your time based on productivity.  In this view, blue is good and red is bad.


v_5
New categorization selection UI.


v_6
New scoring UI