I’m not sure if this is intentional, but adding an editor finally makes offline time workable for me, for offline things like sport, music, etc.

Why?

Because with the old offline time I could never enter any time with any granularity — if the PC is off and I go and do an hour sport then there was no way of adding this time without it adding all the time I used to switch off the PC, get ready, walk to the gym, do sport, come back, switch on the PC, etc. Now, with the Project Editor, I can add this time precisely. That’s great, because now my non-PC goals actually have a chance of being realistic.

One point, though: is it *really* necessary to make this “offline/online/idle” time distinction?

Being warned in the Project Time Editor that “there’s some idle time in this section” is a bit weird.

Can’t we just call it the “Time Editor”, period? :=)

I’m glad this idea has sparked your imagination in the same way it did for me!

I also envisaged notes being time-stamped in the way you described. You could have ranges or even note tags but both these ideas strike me as nice-to-haves. Truthfully, I’ve never been able to see notes linked up to detailed quantitive data so I don’t know exactly how I’ll use it. I think that’s part of what is great about the idea, though: it could have so many uses! How does one respond to such an uncertain situation? It has to be experimentation. Just let users play with the notes feature at its most basic and see what trends/thoughts emerge.

As for services, I love that idea! I’ve not used Yammer but for a Twitter implementation I think you’d want to look for a particular tag (“#productivity”, or something?) to keep the signal-to-noise ratio as high as possible. Another idea that springs to mind is to have a global keyboard shortcut that brings up the note-entry text box so you don’t even have to take your fingers off the keyboard.

I’m really excited now. Thanks for listening.

Ollie

I re-read your comment and wanted to toss out a few thoughts.

We love the idea of notes– thanks for the feedback. While it’s a feature we’ve discussed before, the idea of doing it in the context of the installed app (rather than the web app) didn’t occur to us… Love it!

My thinking is that notes would literally be a point in time. So your note would be assigned to the exact time when you logged it (10:37am)… Do you think that’d be sufficient? Or would you need the ability to assign a range for a notes like “fuzzy headed all morning” or “really focused this afternoon”?

Hrm, we could also consume notes already being entered via services like Twitter or Yammer.

Anyhoo, thanks again for the thoughtful feedback. Good stuff!

I suggested this feature a couple of weeks ago and Mark W replied saying you were already working on it. And now, here it is, great work! As you seem like an organization that actually listens to its users, I’d like to tell you how RescueTime could work more effectively as a productivity improvement tool for me.

In my experience attempting to improve anything begins with the establishment of an inspect and adapt loop, like this:

* To deliver the largest overall improvement, which specific area should we attempt to improve?
* How should it be improved?
* Improve it.
* How effectively did we manage to improve it?
* Repeat.

This is the process I want for my productivity: I want to know where I’m being least productive, why, come up with a way of improving it, try it, and see how well it worked.

With the recent changes RescueTime is now, very effectively, providing me with all the raw quantitive data to make these judgements, which solves the hardest part of the inspect and adapt. But strangely, the easier part hasn’t been addressed: RescueTime hardly provides any mechanism for recording *qualitative* data. RescueTime isn’t giving me anywhere to record my thoughts on how productive I’m being; no place to write “Got a cold today, I don’t except to be very productive, but that’s OK”; no place to say “Start of attempts not to use Twitter this week”.

Without this sort of data, any attempts to improve productivity lack context. The goals feature helps, for sure, but this is quite different from that.

Implementing support for this could be as simple as a new menu item under the dock item “Add Note…”, which would display a text field where a single thought could be entered. Later on you could see the notes plotted on the productivity charts. Some users may only use this feature a couple of times a week but that would make the data so much more meaningful. Little notes like this would act as memory triggers for what you were doing and feeling at the time. This is the sort of stuff that’s invaluable for making good assessments.

It’s possible I’m weird (I like to analyze everything!) and I know I could just make these notes myself. But I think an integrated solution, like the one I’ve just described, would be really powerful and help make RescueTime into a must-have productivity tool that I’d joyfully suggest all my friends try.

Think about it. And if you think this won’t help (it’s always possible I’m wrong or ill-informed) please let me know! I like to learn.

Hey.. this is looking awesome!

The teams approach feels great. Hey.. we use scrum, so for every project we have different assets that go through different “phases” in their design.

We have got to record those phases in order to calculate the total amount of time the whole “asset” took to be built. We have a budget for each phase, so that’s the real goal for us.

I see that you have some import options for projects from basecamp and ms project.. is there any chance we can have it imported from excel? google docs/calc option? inserted via text and indentation? or what are your suggestions for teams that use scrum?

Keep up the great work guys.. congrats! You are DEFINITELY adding value to the customer and its experience! (That now-a-days.. its really weird.. so double congrats!)

Y.

“no eta at the moment, I tried all of our existing methods and none of them worked with the latest beta release. I’m a bit hesitant to spend a whole lot of time on it until it is closer to releaseing, since they seem to be changing core applescript support”

We’re all Mac folk here and I’m personally itching to use Chrome… So we’ll get there eventually!