Rescue Your Time

Ever wanted to know which applications or websites you spend the most time on? Well, look no further. This handy service can help solve your problems.

Rescue Time (for Windows and Mac), is one of the simplest, easy to use, online services, helping you see what your biggest time suckers are on your computer. You first have to download the free software, which runs as an application; basically monitoring your every click.

Analyze.

Once you have logged onto their site, you can then get access too all the data it has collected, laying it out in simple to read bar graphs.  This allows you to see the apps/sites you are using the most and also, how much time you’re actually spending on your computer.

Process.

You then have the ability to go back throughout the day and see exactly when you were on your computer and what you were doing. There are also charts for the day, week, month and year to help you look back at those productive and unproductive days, weeks and months. Tying into that, there is a tab labeled goals and alerts where you can set up reminders to yourself for general things in life, or to remind yourself of the apps or sites you are using a little too much.

One feature which I find extremely useful is that you have the ability to tag multiple apps or sites. So let’s say, you tag Textmate and Mars Edit (two wonderful text editors) with the tag “Blogging.” And then you put Safari and Mail under a tag called “Personal.” This is a great way to see how much time during the day which you spend on work versus play.

Implement.

Personally, I check Rescue Time once every 2 days, taking points of the things that consume the most time for me. I then gradually try and cut back at least 20 minutes a week, on these time consuming apps/sites. While this service might not be for everyone, I do encourage heavy computer users to take a look at it. Productivity and simplicity are two key traits in living a happy life.

Best of all, this is available as a free service for individual use.  Signup can be found here

Comments

  1. #1

    Nick

    Why would anyone think it is a good idea to have a complete history of your computer usage kept by a 3rd party? Ever search for p0rn or link to it inadvertently via a lame digg post? Great, now there’s a permanent record of it. Apparently, they’ll delete it if you want, but who can be sure.

    There are local apps that do the same thing and they do not involve transferring this info to a 3rd party.

  2. #2

    Chris → fluidmarkup.com

    Nick makes a valid point.

    And besides that fact, this article read like a giant ad.

  3. #3

    reemixx → www.reemixx.com

    Rescue Time is potentially a big time suck of its own. I tried it for a bit, and quickly realised I’d rather keep track of my time the good old fashioned way. Many people get so caught up on ways to increase their productivity these days, that they spend less and less time actually BEING productive. Honestly, unless you work for or own a business that really requires every minute of your working day to count, services like this are pointless.

    Nick makes an extremely good point, too. Seems less and less people are caring about privacy issues these days.

  4. #4

    rmaspero → www.rmaspero.com

    This has to be said is one of the coolest ideas I have seen, I am always loosing track of time and it would be nice to see were all that time goes.

  5. #5

    Chris Gilbert → www.desktopvibes.com

    Good point Nick. I was thinking exactly the same thing, but it ultimately depends on how far the application digs down into what you are doing. There’s a difference between seeing you were on Safari, Firefox, etc, and showing what pages you were browsing.

    Just a side comment - I was introduced to a social network by a friend earlier this week very similar to Rescue Time that tracked what software you are using.

  6. #6

    Blair Beckwith

    Chris; Wow, are you serious? Did you even READ the article? No offense, but you should be spending more of your time reading, and maybe less time writing. It specifically says that, and I quote: “Ever wanted to know which applications or websites you spend the most time on?”. Apparently, it keeps VERY good track of which websites you go on. Of course, I haven’t done any research on this, and it’s very possible your writer is the one at fault, and it really doesn’t keep track of which websites you use. if that’s the case, disregard this message and smack him.

  7. #7

    Chris Gilbert

    @Blair: I applogize, I hadn’t read the article in about a week and was going off of what I remembered from editing. I looked into it further after reading your comment and found that yes, it does track what sites you’ve been to. However, you can set some user based restrictions to keep it from doing so.

  8. #8

    Blair Beckwith

    Chris: Applogy accepted. I realize I might have come off a bit strong, so I apologize for that… although, this blog isn’t the place for manly forgivings ;)

  9. #9

    Will Wilkins → iamww.com

    Like Nick mentioned with local apps and privacy, I think a locally installed solution may be better.

    Slife that has similar features to Rescue Time has recently been redesigned and made free. It is currently only available for Mac users. However, they are working on a version for Windows.

Your Comment