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 »

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.

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Changes and Improvements to RescueTime Search

December 16, 2011 — Mark Wolgemuth
First off, RescueTime would like to apologize for the inconsistent performance of the search tool.

We’ve been working as hard as we can to address this problem, and it has required some re-design of how our search works.

The biggest changes you should see with the new search tool are:

1) Speed. It should be fast now!
2) Search only applies to activities and documents now
3) Productivity and categories are no longer searchable in the same way as actitivies.
4) The current month is searchable already, and we are building the new index going back in time– so every day more time in the past will be added, for historical reporting.

In retrospect, while key words make sense for documents and activities, it doesn’t so much for categories or productivity scores where are known and belong to a short list. You can use a categories or productivity report from the links on the right to see those results, and actually do a search “inside” them. The ability to merge category results or multiple productivities will need to wait for new filter controls, which we are planning to introduce in the future.

Those of you have Custom Reports (which are really saved searches) may need to adjust your key words for best results. Likewise, those of you who use hints in Projects may also need to adjust your keywords.

You can think of the core issue this way: when you go to Google and you do a search, you usually care only about the top results– maybe you drill a few pages to find something. When you use “search” at RescueTime, the task is very different: you are actually doing something like “give me a report of all my time that has words like this in it”.

The key distinction here is that in the first case, you only care about retrieving a few, certainly less than 100, of the all the possible results– and if you want more, you have to make multiple requests back to the server. In our case, for your reports to be accurate with total time results, you always need every possible result to be returned. Search technology for documents is pretty well understood at this point, and there are excellent tools available for use– like Sphinx and Lucene. However, search tools are designed, for practical performance reasons among others, to operate well for the Google model of search results.

When applied to our challenge, however, we have to be much more clever about how are system is designed to allow for the “give me everything that matches” idea to work.

Thanks!

Posted in feature, Product News. 2 Comments »

Affiliate / Partner Program Leaves Beta with First Payouts, TrackLabor leading

August 12, 2011 — Mark Wolgemuth

We’re excited to announce we’re helping our best fans add new income to their bottom line. Our partner and affiliate program has been in a private beta for a while to tune the process– but we’re ready to let others join in the opportunity now, as we announce our highest earning partner from our beta program. You can get started as an affiliate easily, just checkout this simple setup guide:

https://www.rescuetime.com/earn

ReplaceMyself.com earns highest partner payout after an experimental referral campaign effort!

Specializing in helping small and one-person businesses develop outsourced resources, ReplaceMyself.com has wrapped RescueTime up in a value-added offering called TrackLabor. As experts in our product, they are able help their clients hit the ground running and get the most from RescueTime– and that is worth a lot to us. Their clients have dived in and brought us a great new user base with lots of ideas for product advancement. As their clients continue enjoying RescueTime through TrackLabor, ReplaceMyself gets regular and recurring income from us. We’re very excited about our future potential working with our partners to help drive product development and customer engagement!

Thanks to Dan Goggins and John Jonas for their patience and careful assistance with this process. Here’s a summary of ReplaceMyself.com’s mission, with TrackLabor and RescueTime as a principal tool:

ReplaceMyself.com teaches employers how to live the 4 hour workweek by using workers in the Philippines!They not only teach employers how they can find workers for under $2 an hour, but they also give them everything they would need to do so: Two large exclusive resume databases to search through, example contracts, tasks, emails, etc.Not only that, but ReplaceMyself.com also automatically trains workers on tons of internet marketing tasks! Employees receive new training modules every month to keep them trained and busy without the employer having to create the training themselves.
Posted in feature, Product News, Shout Out. Comments Off

RescueTime Mobile v2 – Your feedback + collective brainstorm = Great app

July 29, 2011 — Mark Wolgemuth

(updated) v2 is now live in the market– blog update coming soon!

RescueTime for Android v2 is here– and it will serve as the template for all our mobile products. Try it out, contact us, and we’ll give you extra free Pro time.

Highlights:

  • Fully re-designed, native interface, works offline too
  • Manual / offline time tracking, fast and easy with voice input
  • Landscape and tablet friendly
  • Home screen is “hang on the wall pretty” productivity meter
  • Tap meter to switch day / week. Long tap for forced refresh (automatic periodically).
  • Send data over wifi only option

Version 1 was a proof-of-concept to show we could bring the same automatic tracking you expect from RescueTime for your computers to your smartphones. We’re happy to bring you version 2 now as a slick, full-featured, easy to use mobile app. Leaving the automatic tracking intact, we’ve overhauled everything else from the ground up with an emphasis on user experience and feature value. Chief among the advancements is simple and easy offline time tracking that can be voice driven.

Fixes and Improvements

  • Call log now honors “pause” status
  • Detail report moved to Android browser, for better scrolling and seamless experience
  • Syncs with your desktop and website RescueTime settings (schedule and offline choice list)
  • Can be re-registered without a re-install if your SIM changes
  • In-app help
  • Tweaks for memory and cpu efficiency
Instructions for beta app install here:
Download the app here:
Let Mark know you’ve installed it for free Pro upgrade / extension.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Note: the “choose productivity” option in the tracking screens is not yet functional. Everything else is.
Posted in feature, Product News, Product Roadmap. 5 Comments »

RescueTime Launches RescueTime Introductions

June 13, 2011 — jasongrimes

Hello, RescueTimers!

For years we’ve been known as the company that helps you get better at what you do by helping you be more productive and manage your daily activities. Today we are announcing a new offering underneath the RescueTime umbrella called, RescueTime Introductions.

RescueTime Introductions introduce great people to great companies. We do this by using machine learning pattern matching techniques to find matches of RescueTime customers for open positions at some of the hottest companies hiring today. We base are Introduction engine on “archetypes” – people we know who work at top companies who have the most stringent interview processes around. Patterns that are matched are things like ratio of time spent in productive categories, tools used, industry websites looked at, research done, etc. Things that are not as important – efficiency scores, downtime, distracted time. And, in fact, patterns in those areas can help spot someone who is good but is looking for a new challenge.

How do you get started? It’s super easy.

For existing RescueTime users just log into your account and go to settings and you can opt-in to RescueTime Introductions.

Note: If you have a Team account you are not eligible for this program. 

Opt-In to RescueTime IntroductionsFor new users just sign up to use RescueTime to help manage your tasks, computer use and and daily activities. You can choose RescueTime Solo Lite or Pro

Create Your RescueTime Account

Once you’ve created your account you do not need to do anything else. You can choose to optionally create your Introductions Profile.

Create Your Profile

After you’ve been using your RescueTime account for some time we will crunch your data and compare it to some of the most talented information workers around the globe! If there is a match we will offer to introduce you to some truly amazing companies.

For this program we have partnered with some of the hottest companies hiring today like: Dropbox, JustinTV, SEOmoz, eBay and Twitter. And we are constantly screening new potential partners, but they gotta be cool and some place with whom we would consider working.

Our Promise to Our RescueTime Users:

1. We will protect your privacy – we won’t reveal anything about you including your name without your permission.
2. You get to decide who you talk to – companies have to go through us to contact you.
3. When talking to companies we will make you stand out. If you had an “off” month, that’s OK. Everyone has them. And, in fact, it could be a sign that you’d be happier somewhere else.

Get Started Today: Simply open a web browser and go to www.rescuetime.com/intros.

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RescueTime Android App 2.0: What to Expect When You’re Expecting

May 19, 2011 — Mark Wolgemuth

(updated) RescueTime Android 2.0 is live in the marketplace– check it out.

tldr; Animated productivity meter, offline time entry tool (with optional location sensitive suggestion wizard!), more reporting views and basic graphs, fix call log honoring pause feature, update with wifi only option…

Here’s a teaser screen shot from the working alpha version; the color gradually shifts from red to blue as you cross the 50% percentile into productive land; this will also be shrunken to a widget size for your home screen:

Android V2 teaser: the active color sweep meter

Hi Folks,
We’ve got a bit over a month under our belt with our Android app in the wild. We’ve been juiced up with Google IO awesomeness. We’ve got about 1000 mobile users trying us out, and climbing. Our first goal was to satisfy people clamoring for basic automatic mobile time tracking, but it’s time to start on what’s next!

You’ve been great about feedback, and we’ve had some ideas of our own. Top of the list is of course “When iOS?!!”. Well, the on-device app activity tracking has particular challenges on that platform, but we see RescueTime for Android 2.0 as an opportunity to prove the case of a general purpose tool that complements RescueTime and adds new capabilities unique to mobile devices, and can feel the same on all platforms. This allows us to progress on a parallel iOS project while tackling app tracking separately.

Key among the new features will be:

UI Redesign We’ve gone back and rebuilt the interface from the ground up to get the best performance and user experience out of Android, based on what we’ve learned.

Tracker: This tool will be a handy way to more precisely track offline or away-from-device, or whatever-you-want time. It will have a start-stop button, and way to assign what it was that can be entered as text, spoken using voice recognition, or (optionally, turn it off if you want!) “suggested” based on location data.

Better Data Views: We’ll have a Launcher widget productivity meter. We’ll be cacheing some data app-side, so you can see some results even when offline– this will also improve speed. Additionally, improvements to the UI will add more reporting perspectives.

New Preferences: You can tell RescueTime to only update data over WiFi, if you want. Also, you can decide whether or not to let us use Location information to remember offline time options (note: even when enabled, this data won’t leave your device, it’s only used locally to help out).

Errata Fixes: Call log history will now honor your pause status (calls made during pause periods will not get reported, up to a reasonable point in history). The current “update frequency” control only affects repeated updates while the device is on continuously– every time you turn your phone off, or open the dashboard, in the current design an update is sent. In v2, it will honor the frequency control here as well.

This is some of what is in the plans right now (some of it’s already coded!), not a guarantee of what’s delivered of course. Let us know what you think! Also, I’ll be posting for those interested in beta access in a week or two.

–Mark Wolgemuth

Posted in feature, Product News, Product Roadmap. Comments Off

Google IO Follow Up: Why candy is good for you

May 13, 2011 — Mark Wolgemuth

tldr; Innovation gets easier, loots = better apps sooner, look for substantial feature adds on RescueTime Android and full featured Chrome version.

Well, we’re back from Google IO. I can say, having been there three times running now– this one was rampant with the nerd herd stampeding from one awesomeness to the next like no other place on earth. Like squirrels in a nuthouse. Android momentum is, as they say, “off the chain”. Alright, I’m done with the memetheme, here’s the meat:

The best news is the claimed effort to de-splinter platform branches across all types of devices with Android, Chrome and the Chrome OS. This really will make the world easier, for a company like ours. This includes the drive for Ice Cream Sandwich release to bring phone, tablet, tv, and whatever Android device under the same tree. It lets us programmatically adapt to device capabilities inside one version of RescueTime rather than building from separate branches to separate targets. And that means you get our app on your device sooner, and likely more bug free. It also encourages us to think outside the box, by making funky lateral product spread easy, like maybe a realtime team pulse dashboard for your office lobby? or automatic coupon credits to your mobile dev for hitting goals in RescueTime?

As to the Candy Store at the Chocolate Factory: the practice of showering uberloots on attendees has its detractors, but my (possibly biased, heh) opinion is that this makes perfect sense: I was able to track down an issue with RescueTime on tablets that the emulator couldn’t help me with, in about an hour, thanks to having a tablet to test with in hand. Developers using Google tool kits get updates out faster than other platforms by virtue of Google sponsored test platform access.

Even more exciting is the chance to work on a full featured Chrome / Chrome OS version of RescueTime that will work online + offline on the browser and upcoming chromebooks. Using HTML5 and Chrome APIs *should* let us provide a seamless experience in both browser-only and full OS systems. When imagining this kind of dev effort, there’s a big difference between planning out your strategy, functional item in hand, chatting with the Google project manager and engineer who worked on the APIs, than sitting at a desk hunting StackOverflow and waiting on user group posts. It’s the fast track for good apps that a submit-a-form-lottery wouldn’t provide.

What do we expect next year? There’s an obvious collision course for Android and Chrome, I expect there to be news on that front. This kind of collapse-of-complexity innovation lets companies like us focus on what we’re trying to be best at: using data to help you understand yourself better, helping people get more done and hopefully getting them more quality play time while we’re at it, rather than tracking down the latest reason for some client feature to fail on some variously-patched desktop system on some archaic OS.

What would I ask from Google for next year? Let’s have more deep dive technical sessions. Maybe some more on linking between platforms and services (eg Chrome OS -> AppEngine). Most important for you to compete with Amazon to get the start-up pool? You need to provide some kind of migration path or toolkit for those of us with monstrous and complicated data mines. Smart, funded early startups are already past the prototype stage and can ill afford much platform layer costs. Finally, the idea of the Developer Advocate is great- build on that, and spread out geographically to get face to face outside the valley.

– Mark Wolgemuth FIRSTNAME@rescuetime.com

Posted in feature, Product Roadmap, Shout Out. Comments Off

RescueTime Google IO Hot Sauce #3: Diabolus ex Machina with a Scotch Bonnet

May 10, 2011 — Mark Wolgemuth

To top off our saucy Google IO collection, I’ve set up some industrial grade SQL drills in the data mine that finds which of you hackers are running RescueTime on their phones AND are at or are following Google IO sessions. It’ll automatically (we humans don’t peek at your data!) pick some of you and hook you up with the same lifetime(*) deal of sauce #1, sometime tonight or tomorrow morning.

Posted in feature. 1 Comment »

RescueTime Google IO Hot Sauce #2 “Pepper for the People”: Free Pro Year for Android Signups

May 10, 2011 — Mark Wolgemuth

Hi Folks,

We’re psyched to represent at IO this year with a new Android client. To celebrate, we’re going to welcome all new Android users who signup between May 10 and May 11 with a bonus year of Pro service. You’ve all given great support through the continuing development and improvement of RescueTime through years, and it’s payback time.

Existing Android customers: if you feel left out, just ping us by the end of the week!

This deal applies to Solo accounts.

Posted in feature, Product News. Comments Off
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