Last week I received an interesting request from a friend:
1:19:10 PM friend: My boss has requested that you run a report: ‘select count(*) from [pages visited table] where [url visited]=’http://www.randomtimewastingsite.com/’
He was joking, but it got me thinking about the question of how much time is spent on various apps and sites. So I ran some more queries and found that so far, RescueTime users have spent:
- 38 days on news.ycombinator.com
- 41 days on reddit.com
- 2 months on netvibes.com
- 2 1/2 months on digg.com
- 8 3/4 months on World of Warcraft
- 9 months on youtube.com
- 9 1/4 months on facebook.com
- 3 1/2 years on google.com
- 3 1/2 years on gmail.com
- 5 3/4 years on Outlook
Don’t worry – there’s no way for anyone to know which users go where or do what, but this information in aggregate is pretty nifty. It really makes you wonder how much of this time is wasted time.
Up until now, RescueTime’s been good about letting you know where you spend (or waste!) your time, but it’s really been up to you to do something about it. Last night we launched some new features that can actively start helping you to reach your goals.
Introducing Goals and Alerts!
Now you can set goals that you’d like to try to meet:
See how you’re doing through the day, week, or month:
And be alerted when you meet or exceed a goal via email, RSS, or SMS:
We also changed the look of the graphs to be cleaner and easier to read as part of some larger interface improvements we’ll be making to the site in the coming weeks.
We hope you like the new stuff. As always, let us know what you think using our built-in feedback form or on satisfaction. Goals and alerts was one of our most requested features and we’re working on more additions and improvements already.
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January 23, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Awesome!
Idea: aggregate goals into a group competition.
Everyone in my group sets a goal:
- 10 hours of dev per day.
- <1 hour of waste a day
Public embarrassment (or agreed upon monetary benefits/punishments)
This requires aligned tagging. I use dev, comms, waste, overhead.
Goal feature request: fractional hours. 0.50 hours is already too much.
January 23, 2008 at 5:32 pm
The aggregate data is absolutely fantastic! And fun! And interesting! It would be great to have a simple RescueTime Index page (like Harper’s Index.)
You could roll up by Day, Week, Month, and Year…
January 23, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Looks great. Nice UI.
It would be useful to set weekly goals as well. E.g., I need to spend at least 2 hours per week on my blog, doesn’t matter when.
January 25, 2008 at 3:14 am
Goals sound awesome!
Possible to have the site email a warning x minutes before you go over your goal?
January 27, 2008 at 3:24 am
@Avi – you can actually think about something more complex that will predict, according to your recent work habits, whether your going to make it or not.
For example, I want to spend 8 hours a day on work. I usually finish my work related stuff around 8:00pm. Hence, if at 6:00pm I covered only 6 hours of work, I’m gone miss my goal, unless I’ll dedicate the next 2 hours to my work.
January 30, 2008 at 12:52 am
A really nice addin. Looking forward to check it out.
February 2, 2008 at 3:15 pm
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