RescueTime Blog

A couple weeks ago Robby and I attended this meeting of self trackers known simply as Seattle Quantified Self. With over 30 people attending the third meetup, there were plenty of show + tell sessions covering weight, happiness, transportation and productivity. Each of these talks were very informative and described how people committed to documenting their every day lives while making small changes for the future. My favorite was Amelia’s Hacker’s Diet implementation of weighing herself everyday.

Amelia Greenhall: Weigh Everyday = Understanding

Amelia Greenhall (Seattle): Weigh Everyday = Understanding from David Reeves on Vimeo.

Buster Benson: How I use RescueTime

Buster Benson: How I use RescueTime from David Reeves on Vimeo.

Adam Loving: FeatBeat

Adam Loving (Seattle): Featbeat from David Reeves on Vimeo.

Robby McDonell: Transportation Logging

Robby MacDonell: One Month of Transportation Logging from David Reeves on Vimeo.

Erik Kennedy: Tracking Happiness

Erik Kennedy: Quantifying Happiness from David Reeves on Vimeo.
We are excited and looking forward to the next meeting so stay tuned.

Hi there! I’m Robby Macdonell and I’m thrilled to be joining the RescueTime team to help out with product development and the overall user experience. They’re a great bunch of guys, and I have an awesome view of Elliot Bay out our office window, but there are a few other reasons why I’m giddy with excitement about this:

1. I just happen to be the very first RescueTime user ever

That’s right, back in late 2007 when RescueTime was just an idea, I helped out for a couple weeks on the front-end. I ended up being in the right place at the right time, and BOOM, I got first-user bragging rights! I’ve taken a couple of breaks from it over the years, but all in all, I’ve logged 5,643 hours and 9 minutes of computer time over the past 4 years.

2. I LOVE geeking out about data. 

How so? I’m glad you asked. One time I wanted to make a mix CD that would be good on a rainy fall day. I cross-referenced the three years of my last.fm listening data against historical precipitation and temperature records. The mix was actually pretty damn good. Or, there was the time I got the feeling I would benefit from switching to a bike for my daily commute, so I spent a month tracking down-to-the-second location data to get a better understanding of my transportation habits. Turns out the bike is a good idea, any way you look at the data.

3. Right now is a really exciting time for personal data. 

When RescueTime started a few years ago, the idea of stockpiling these massive piles of data about yourself seemed kinda weird. It wasn’t really clear how it could actually be beneficial to people. I feel like that’s starting to change. Particularly in the health space, a lot of really exciting stuff is coming out that clearly shows that giving people more data about themselves can help them make positive changes. Nike+, Fitbit, and Zeo are great examples of this. Given the fact that people are spending an ever-increasing amount of time focused on their computers and smart phones, RescueTime all of a sudden finds itself in a really interesting position.

I think there’s something really profound that can happen here. Right now, so many websites will track as much data as they possibly can about their users’ computer habits. This is done mainly to serve you ads that you are more likely to click on. I find that fact pretty depressing. What if there was a way to flip that around? To make your data something that you control and benefit from? To help you make the right decisions for yourself.

I think that would be amazing. I want to make it happen. And I can’t wait to share it with you.

If you’d like to follow me personally, you can follow me on twitter at @robby1066. Be forewarned, though, you’ll likely get a lot of posts about hockey and cupcakes.

It’s becoming increasingly common and even necessary to measure the productivity of your knowledge workers, either locally staffed or remote. You can ask your employees to complete timesheets and lengthy status emails, but do you really know how your company’s human asset is being spent? You want to optimize your team’s time for their sake and yours– but when people try to enter their own time, they are at best mostly inaccurate, even with good intentions. RescueTime Team Edition gives you and your employees a very high level of detailed information with minimal or no data entry.

1. Sign up for RescueTime Team Edition. 14 day Free Trial with no setup fees. This will get you started quickly. http://www.rescuetime.com/signup/team/empower

2. Add Some Users From Your Team. If you didn’t during the setup process, add users to your account through Settings -> Add Users. It sends them an email to walk them through their personalized setup. As your users get setup, you can continue fine tuning the administrative settings such as custom categories, adjustments to what gets monitored, monitoring schedules and group management. I recommend that new organizations try to have their users in Open Mode with a 24×7 Monitoring Schedule. Remember, categorizations and re-scoring applies to each group separately– so your Sales team doesn’t have the same settings as your Development group. Open mode gives the users in your organization the ability to turn on, off and pause the RescueTime data collector. When a user is done working simply choose “Pause until tomorrow”, and we ignore activities until his/her next day of work. Giving users control over their RescueTime experience as part of the information sharing experience.

3. Set goals and workplace policy about leisure surfing and other activities. Goals are on the right hand menu under Settings -> Goals. Positive goals are great– You can acknowledge those who reach impressive results like 4 or more hours of solid productive work in a day. Give your team some guidelines on what activities are Productive and some common sense about leisure surfing while at work. At RescueTime HQs we have goals set at 5 hours of Productivity each day and we encourage light leisure surfing to less than an 1 hour a day.

4. Spend time categorizing which sites are Productive versus those that are Unproductive; Go to Time Reports -> Activities. Facebook.com is the obvious example that gets a default of “Very unproductive”. Maybe you are social marketing firm who runs on Facebook, you can re-score it to be Productive. Your choice here is an “it’s like this most of the time” consideration. You should also decide whether Email is Productive or Neutral for your organization. For example, Developers often find Email neutral and time spent coding is productive.

5. Set up your Offline Time options. Go to Settings -> Monitoring. This will allow your team to classify work after they have stepped away. You get 6 options. Some suggestions would include: Meeting, Phone Call, Food, Personal, Other Work. Android smartphone or tablet users can run the mobile app, and have unlimited custom offline time input, including an easy “stopwatch” interface.

6. Quickly scan to see who’s active in a group and who might be stuck. Use the Attendance Time Report seen below.

7. Know what your Team is doing at all times. Review the All Activities graph for all team members. You can sort by employee and duration: day, week or year.

Now that you have everything setup and running for your team I would recommend that you collect at least 2 weeks of data before making any changes based on what RescueTime is reporting. We strongly believe in our users that if you give them the data to help make them more productive they will take those actions and change – we can guarantee your team will boost their productivity . Get started today - http://www.rescuetime.com/signup/team/empower.

From the Whitson Gordon author:

If you prefer something that tracks what you’re doing at all times, I can’t recommend RescueTime enough. It’s how I started reclaiming my time in only seven days, and it’s a great way to see where your workday’s falling apart. Just sign up, download the app, and let it run. After a few days, you can see how much time you’ve spent in certain apps and on certain web sites, and categorize them into “productive” and “unproductive” activities.

We couldn’t be more pleased! Thanks LifeHacker and Whitson!

We’re often surprised by how little work we get done during the day even after we’ve spent several hours in front of a computer screen. In 2007, Salary.com did a survey that found Americans waste 20% of their time at work, and 34.7% of all respondents said that surfing the Internet was the biggest distraction. Over the past four years, RescueTime has been collecting anonymous data from users who have opted to share that information with us. Using that data, we’ve compiled a list of the most distracting websites from 2008 and 2011.

The first things we noticed were Facebook’s and YouTube’s engagement numbers. In 2008, those two sites garnered respectively 14.8 and 11.3 minutes per user every day. Facebook especially has surged since then. By 2009, the average user spent 18.9 minutes per day on Facebook. By 2011, they were spending 23 minutes per day on the popular social network. That means the average person spent 58% more time on Facebook in 2011 than in 2008. By contrast, YouTube has remained relatively stable with the average time spent increasing from 11.3 minutes per day in 2008 to 11.4 minutes in 2011. However, RescueTime users have collectively spent 139,035,465 seconds on YouTube so far in 2011, placing it third only to Google Reader and Facebook. That amounts to 9,343 minutes per day watching web clips. On the other hand, RescueTime users spent 469,150,954 seconds or 781,9182 minutes per day on Facebook in 2011! This goes to show the powerful, worldwide dominance that Facebook and YouTube exert.

Also interesting to note is the race between Digg and reddit. In 2008, Digg was the clear winner between these two news-sharing services as our users collectively spent 338 minutes per day on Digg versus 186 minutes per day at reddit. However, the average time spent per user on each site was perhaps a sign of things to come as the average reddit user spent 9.9 minutes on the site in 2008. On Digg, the average user only spent 6.1 minutes browsing the site each day. Today, Digg no longer even ranks in the top 12 most distracting sites. Reddit, though, now comes in at number 5. Even more incredible is that the average reddit user now spends 25.3 minutes there every day.

Hulu is another site that has seen a wild ride over the years. Although the site debuted in 2007, it didn’t show up in our rankings until 2009 when it shot up to be the sixth most distracting site with 15,966,181 seconds spent there by our users or 729 minutes per day. That means that on average, Hulu was distracting each user to the tune of 21 minutes every day. Yet that slipped to just 11.6 minutes on average by 2010. So far in 2011, Hulu has slipped slightly further to 11.2 minutes, but it’s still the ninth most distracting site overall.

In contrast to Hulu’s wild ride, Amazon.com has held steady. In 2009, Rescue Time users spent an average of 4.9 minutes every day either shopping or just browsing the merchandise. So far in 2011, that number has dropped just slightly to 4.4 minutes per day. What’s also interesting about this is that Amazon.com ranks at the bottom of our most distracting websites in terms of how much time we spend there per day. Social networking, news and opinion, and entertainment sites are all much more popular.

Of those three categories, social networking is the clear winner. In addition to Facebook, users spent 6.7 minutes per day at Twitter so far in 2011 for a grand total of 2742 minutes each day amongst all users. Vkontakte.ru is another popular social network destination with 27.3 minutes spent there per day by the average user for a grand total of 996 minutes each day. Factor in Facebook’s Apps community, and users spent a grand total of 31,892 minutes every day on social networks in 2011. That’s 131,820 hours or 5,492 days spent on social networks.

Taken together, these trends go to show how our interests have shifted over the years. Facebook was the most distracting site in 2008 and remains so today, but the average RescueTime user now spends 58% more time there. Digg, once popular, is now a has-been while reddit continues to garner more and more of our attention. Sites like Amazon.com remain steady while Hulu surged to popularity but now slowly fades. It’ll be interesting to see how these trends play out over the next few years.

We received the nicest love letter from Simplifilm – those guys are the best!

We love the fact that you don’t just exist to make a buck (though we surely hope that that is happening). You measure things and help people improve. That is noble. You share an intimate, sacred trust with some of the best coders, writers, thinkers and doers. We want to get more people to meet you.It’s selfish, but we believe that you could improve the whole country. New government programs–or tax cuts–won’t fix our mess. Productivity will. You make people more productive. We believe that if more people used RescueTime, everything – everywhere – would get better You are so terribly vital to the world that it would be horrible to not see you grow.

It’s been a long time since someone has really impressed me in terms of winning RescueTime’s business. Chris and Jason the founders of Simplifilm took the time to understand our products and how best to evangelize what we do. We look forward to this project and our future partnership! If you’d like to see the whole blog article then go to: http://www.simplifilm.com/rescue-time.

Earlier this week we had a story break on LifeHacker.com titled “How to Reclaim Your Time in Seven Days for a More Productive and Stress-Free Workday” and we have been growing users by the thousands! We wanted to extend a warm welcome to you folks and should you need any assistance please open up a support ticket at http://help.rescuetime.com and we’ll take care of you ASAP.

It’s been several months and we wanted to provide a general update as to how all things RescueTime were performing. The good news is we have many, many great customers who are passionate and vocal about our products and services, who care deeply about their productivity and their ability to manage the ever shrinking amount of time that we all have to get things done. Here’s a glimpse at some of the team’s accomplishments over the last 3 months.

Features

Rolled Out Single Sign-On Services
If you already have a Google, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account you are in luck – you no longer have to rely on RescueTime for login credentials. You can safely use your open authentication ID and keep the password problems down to a minimum. This has been a massively adopted feature with over 28,000+ users using this service. Thanks to our CTO Brian for bringing this functionality to all of our RescueTime users.

RescueTime Goes Mobile
Deployed first iteration of our mobile solution with an Android Application that extends RescueTime’s capabilities to your phone. Our Chief Architect Mark is our primary mobile developer and with a very rough set of objectives set out to extend the RescueTime feature set to the Android OS. We are now at over 2000 installs and rising! The great flexibility of Android development allows for Call Reporting and app usage time tracking. In the next month, maybe even earlier, we will be rolling out version 2.0 of our Android application, featuring a new offline time tracking tool.

And for those still asking what about iOS/iPhone development? Mark is already working on that as I type this up.

Robust Affiliate Program for Resellers and Referrals
We launched a major revision to our referral and reselling agreements in June 2011. Our Chief Architect, Mark spent a significant amount of time in development and planning to create a proper Affiliate program that could grow with our users, while also building relationships with partners willing to beta test, like TrackLabor. Now our users and other partners can resell RescueTime and receive a significant cut of each referred account’s payment. As of this morning we have onboarded 21 new affiliates and partners, and they received their first payouts in July. This has been one of the biggest uptakes in our business and we are grateful to have such evangelical customers and affiliates.

To sign up to be RescueTime affiliate please visit: http://www.rescuetime.com/earn.

Launching Profiles
Profiles – what a great way to demonstrate to your colleagues, mentors and others exactly how you spend your time, what skills do you possess and what are the sites you most oftenly use for reference. Right now, we use this as SEO juice and to look at a high level whether a candidate may be a good fit for our Introductions program – more on this later.

RescueTime Unveils Introductions – http://www.rescuetime.com/intros
Definitely the most talked about development at RescueTime has been around launching the pilot for Introductions. Introductions is where we partner with some high profile recruiting partners and try to attract some of the world’s best Developers, DevOps folks, Systems Engineers and User Interface experts. We were fortunate enough to appear on TechCrunch as “RescueTime Launches Introductions, A Carfax Report For Top Job Candidates.” We have successfully partnered with Netflix, Dropbox, eBay, JustinTV, SEOmoz, Cheezburger and Valve on finding quality candidates for unfilled positions within each organization. This program is on-going so we’re not ready to share the numbers on this just yet, but the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

RescueTime Trends – http://www.rescuetime.com/trends
We are just scratching the surface here, but our CEO Joe has successfully kicked off custom Trends projects with some top universities and mainstream media.  More exciting announcements soon!

Small Fix for Team Accounts
For Team users, we are continuing to improve the way in which Team accounts are managed. We’ve recently added a Delete users options for those companies who had employees leave. Previously, we never had a way to delete expired users entirely and it was always a custom request to Support.

Press

• Google’s Les Paul Doodle consumes record 5.3M hours, RescueTime estimates – Most trafficked story of the day on Geekwire!
• Tech moves: New hires at Point Inside, RescueTime, etc.

What to Expect in the Next Few Months from RescueTime

• Android v2.0 – coming very soon!
• iOS/iPhone Application
• RescueTime Varsity – Program to engage college students, teachers and administrators
• Improving the RescueTime Sign up and Activation process
• Additional features for our RescueTime Solo Pro and Team users