Comments on: Major Release: Time to Put out some Fires!

By: Tony Wright

Tony Wright — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:24:16 +0000

We watch Mint pretty closely– they’ve been making tags less and less prominent (I imagine they see the same issue with tags– under-use and confusion). I can see why they haven’t removed them (removing features makes people grumpy, but our data/feedback seems to indicate that the pain was worth it– revenue, signups, and retention are shootin’ up since our last release).

One of the (semi secret) reasons we punted tags is that we do want to eventually implement a project-tracking feature of RescueTime, which I think would give insight into how folks perform on different projects as well as stuff like billability. So something like that may be on the horizon.

In the meantime, if you wanted to use RescueTime to track billable stuff, I would use scores as tags. I know it’s kind of a kludge, but you could assign activities/documents a score of “2″ if they are billable, “1″ if they are still productive but not billable, etc.

If they goal is project level granularity rather than a sum of billable time, that might have to wait for our projects feature (which is realistically at least a month or two away).

By: Gene

Gene — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:10:39 +0000

What are your thoughts re: taking a Mint.com approach and bringing back tags as a way to create user-defined groupings? (Billable time is a great example, as it would be nice to get a tally of hours rather than a productivity score.)

By: Tony Wright

Tony Wright — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:48:49 +0000

“Timesinking is something I’ve come to expect from any time management tool, because it takes some kind of time investment in order to figure out how to get some time back.”

True ’nuff. THAT’s where we want to be different. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to pull time from thin air, but hopfully we can keep the learning curve and the required time investment to a bare minimum!

By: Qrystal

Qrystal — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:25:38 +0000

Holy smokes, does this update ever look awesome! Good work, RescueTimers.

I have only one issue, and it’s with this line: “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?).”

Ironic? No. Ironic means the outcome was unexpected. Timesinking is something I’ve come to expect from any time management tool, because it takes some kind of time investment in order to figure out how to get some time back. I’d say this is more of a Catch-22. Or was, rather. It looks to be fixed rather well!

I’m looking forward to seeing how the changes inspire me to increase my productivity scores!

By: Tony Wright

Tony Wright — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:04:38 +0000

Hey Daran- It might take 10-15m worth of work, but I think scores could do that for you– just assign a score of 2 to anything billable, a score of 1 to anything productive but NOT billable, etc.

By: Daran

Daran — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:46:27 +0000

The ONLY thing i miss about tags was that i had only tagged stuff billable and unbillable and that was a massive timesaver because i didnt need to look at individual tasks and work it out.

By: Andrey Tarantsov

Andrey Tarantsov — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:46:34 +0000

Hey. That twitter pic in the header of your post — I’ve actually got the phrase from your previous blog post about the upcoming changes. Fun twitter turnaround.

BTW this fireman thing is great, you should feature it on the home page too.

By: jammus

jammus — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:07:10 +0000

Yeah, I’m sure I’ll get used to it in time. It’s just unfortunate that I’d previously ignore productivity scores and just focused on how much time was spend on ‘work’ and how that was broken down. It a few months I’ll have forgotten all about tags and the wonderful times we spent together, until she left. Blub blub.

I do really miss percentages though as that was how I scored myself. 70% of desk time working (or very productive now), 45% web development, 15% email were quite a good set of metrics. Again, I’ll move on.

Is it possible to add new top-level categories? Do I want to?

By: Nick Gilbert

Nick Gilbert — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:44:59 +0000

Like Jammus, I was fairly enraged when I saw they’d dropped tags, but now I’ve had time to look into it properly, I’ve realised that the built in charts now do exactly what I was using tags to achieve, but possibly better. So give it a try for a couple of weeks before you go complaining to Tony

By: ya-ya

ya-ya — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:04:33 +0000

Hi, Is there a simple way to get my “Custom Categories” to show up again, rather than showing on my Dashboard as “Custom Category”? Thanks!! Overall, I prefer the simpler interface so thank you for all you do!!