RescueTime

Identify potential time wasters with RescueTime

Kommentare: Rescue time helped me to capture my app and website behaviour and thus made it possible to identify areas where I could cut back on wasting time or streamline the usage of an app. This was especially obvious with the use of e-mail. Now I try to stick to certain times a day which cut back the time of e-mail usage significantly. Also if you already have the feeling that you spent too much time with distracting activities you can block them.

Vorteile:

The detailed analysis of how I use apps and websites made it possible to become more efficient when working with a computer. You can also block distractions if needed.

Nachteile:

Personally I don’t have any complaints but if you don’t want to have all your app and website usage logged online then this might be a downside.

Frictionaless Time Tracking

Kommentare: I primarily use it to understand and track my own efficiency and make sure that what I am actually doing aligns with my strategic and operational directives.

Vorteile:

It works in the background, I don't need to remember to turn it on or off. No need to disposition time regularly so it doesn't interfere with organic or non-linear workflows. I can go back and disposition all at once at the end of the day or very few days.

Nachteile:

Update frequency seems high and sometimes the update pop-up is intrusive.

The tool of champions!

Vorteile:

RescueTime is an absolutely brilliant time tracking tool. It has given me a very simple but accurate tool for tracking exactly how much time I spend on projects. It's brilliant because it tracks time by app but also by websites visited. So I can include research time and reading time into the time I spend on projects. It tracks multiple devices which is great because I tend to switch between devices when working on projects. It's non intrusive and runs completely silently in the background with a simple weekly email and all data available via the mobile app.

Nachteile:

It would be great to set up project and task tracking within the app so we can group our activities.

Consistently great, but dangerous for managers

Kommentare: I've used RescueTime for years. It's the ultimate in "set and forget" software. Essentially it sits on your computer and silently watches your productivity, totaling up the time you spend doing actual work and the time you spend goofing off. At the end of the week you get a nice little email report telling you how you did. It does a great job not shaming you when you do poorly, as I have many times. When you have a really productive week, however, it rewards you by documenting that fact.

Vorteile:

Provides a great little nudge to remind you that when you're on your computer working, you should, be, like, working... the free offering is excellent, allowing you do a semi-deep dive into your data, seeing what you're doing most and helping you improve

Nachteile:

The software is great, and the portal too, but the thing I worry about most is this sort of thing getting in the hands of (bad) developer managers, who might use it to spy on their employees, firing the least "productive" ones. Truly, everyone needs a break now and then, so it worries me a bit that this powerful program could fall into the wrong hands. "With great power comes great responsibility", that sort of thing.. The other thing is the feature set has not changed much in recent years. Subtle improvements could go along way... for instance, I wish it could help me with is filling in my timesheet each week. Imagine if it could tell me which solutions i have open most often in VS Code, for example, and I could charge my time to each project.

My favorite solution for seeing where time is spent

Kommentare: Easiest way to track productivity and time spent across applications/categories.

Vorteile:

Rescuetime automatically tracks and categorizes the activities of you and your team. It makes it easy to see what areas and applications you might be spending more time in than expected. The weekly report emails are great and the productivity score is a nice way to get a glance at productivity vs previous months.

Nachteile:

I would like if there was a different way to categorize specific files from different projects into projects within rescuetime. There may be a way to make a solution like this happen with the current features, but if I could tag certain portions of time towards specific projects it would give me further insight not only on the type of work I am doing (development, communication), but into the specific project that time was spent on. This is a small niche need though and it hasn't stopped me from using Rescuetime.