Rescue Your Time With RescueTime

On the internet, losing all sense of time isn’t that hard. One link leads to another and suddenly we realize that we’ve spent an hour killing little stick figures in a flash game on some ad-laden site. Hey, a good bout of violence once in a while helps exercise the heart!

When I finally do get off and into the ‘real world,’ I’m asked–and wonder myself–how time passes so quickly. And frankly, the answer is – I don’t know. The interwebs are just that kind of place.

And that is where RescueTime comes in. RescueTime is free time management software that lets you see how much time you spend on the computer and internet, including where you spend it. It logs the time and places you visit on the internet, and can also record usage of regular programs such as a music player or word processor.

For example, it can show me how much time I spent on Gmail or that flash games site I was talking about. It can also log other computer activity so I can see how much time I spend writing or listening to music by recording how long these programs are active.

The logger stops recording when the computer is inactive, so I don’t have to worry about the time I’m away from the computer still being logged and counted in my total.

Although RescueTime cannot force you to spend less time on anything, it can give you pretty graphs and charts showing you exactly how you spend your time on the computer and online. For some responsible folks, a straight hard look at this information can be enough to make them think about cutting back on their dosage.

For the rest of us, looking at our computer usage like RescueTime presents it is actually pretty cool!

To get RescueTime up and running you’ll need their data collector (which needs to be installed, download from their website), and a user account at their website which will allow you to see all the collected data. The data collector is a small download of less than a megabyte in size and installation takes only a few seconds. There are no browser plug-ins or toolbars needed for this to work as all logging is done by the collector and works across all browsers on Windows, Mac, and a third-party Linux version is also available. Setting up an account at rescuetime.com is completely free and very easy to do as well. Of course, an internet connection is required for the collector to send the information in the first place. The data collector runs at just 2MB of memory, which isn’t much considering some of the memory hogs we’re used to running these days (*wink, wink*).

The RescueTime website is where you can see and manage all the data that is recorded. It can take a couple of days for the recorder to gather enough information to make an interesting first look, so I recommend you install it and then forget for 2-3 days. Believe me, its worth it looking at those graphs populated with data!

The main page of your user account (or Dashboard) presents a weekly overview of activity in terms of hours spent each day and highlights the most used program for the week. For every piece of information (ie. website or program logged), you can set up tags that can help bunch different programs together as one purpose and so have them shown under one category in a graph. So for example, if I do my writing both online and off, I could tag MS Word and Google Docs as ‘writing’ to generalize their function. Similarly, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail along with my POP email client can be tagged as ‘email’ so I can see the total time spent on email in a day or week, or if I’ve been using it long enough, a year. The site also gives the ability to rate each tag as being positively or negatively productive or effectiveness on a scale of -2 to +2.

So MS Word gets a productive rating of 2 and that flash games site gets a negative 2 (well, of course!). A weekly score is calculated based on these ratings to give an overview of generally what’s being done, with the productive ratings taking it up, and the negative bringing it down.

You can also set Goals and Alerts based on the tags for your logged programs and sites. A goal, for example would be that I want to spend less than an hour on Facebook everyday. The site can also alert you via SMS or RSS feeds on completion or failure of the goals you specify, so it’s a great way of rubbing in the fact that you exceeded your daily allotted time for time-wasting!

A feature recently rolled out is called Groups, which allows you to set up a group of people whose data is logged as a team. This is especially useful for small business teams and allows managers to see what is being done in their team. It works on the same basis of productivity and effectiveness points albeit in a more general way in the sense that members of a group can only see how their time compares to an average of their team and not with individuals. Groups of up to 5 people are free but cost $12.95/mo (per user) for larger groups.

RescueTime is essentially software that sits in your system tray and logs online activity, and then uploads to the RescueTime website for you to sign in and see later.

For the privacy buffs who may be squirming in their chairs with uneasiness, remember that this is strictly opt-in software. It can be seen by anyone in the sense that it does not attempt to conceal itself in the system processes, and can be seen as a prominent red white plus sign (ie. their logo) in the system tray. The data recorder is not capable of stealing any passwords or key strokes either, and can only look at running processes. Logging can be disabled for any length of time in the program preferences, and the whole program can be uninstalled completely very easily. The RescueTime website even gives you the option of deleting data from your account, selectively or completely, that will remove all your data from their server.

The logger can also use a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection to transmit the data, which is an option in the logger preferences I recommend you enable so that your information cannot be intercepted on its way to the servers.

For added privacy, there is also a website whitelist option that, when enabled, will only let the collector log the sites you specifically tell it to log. All other websites will be seen as “other unknown website” in your logs and will be unknown to RescueTime as well.

RescueTime is a great free way to look at your computer usage trends. For corporate and personal use customers, it offers the possibility of an effective time management aide and a fun way of looking at what we do on the computer. The developers have done a great job of making a simple, easy to use app that does its job well. RescueTime runs in the background and only notifies you if an update is available, and with its 2MB memory footprint, it is basically an install-and-forget program. It’s a great app that can help you and your business become more productive with time management, and I recommend you at least give a try to see what it can do and how it can help in day to day use.

This is a guest post by Waleed Zuberi, who juggles his time between being a student, a freelance web developer and a writer — but most of the time, he’s just a geek. Check out his website, or follow him on Twitter!

This Article Was also published in october issue of Spider Magazine.

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