RescueTime Blog
New on Rescuetime.com. When are you in the zone?
January 30, 2012 — Robby MacdonellAre 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.
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A New Report and Search / Key Word Filtering Improvements
January 19, 2012 — Mark Wolgemuthtldr; We’ve added a “Activity Details” report, that presents your normal graph views of rank, over time, and productivity of all your “detailed” activities, or documents. This view is particularly useful combined with the Search word filtering tool, which now has improved results matching.
Search Improvements: Foundation for Our New Report
Our previously announced search improvements were primarily targeted at dramatic speed gains and increased reliability. As this new infrastructure stabilized, we took a careful look at how key word filtering was working for users, and considered the great feedback our users provided in conjunction with our own analysis. Then, over the last few weeks, we’ve been tuning how we can better and more intuitively match against user’s requested search parameters– for example, if you are in Word and have a long file path for the current document you are editing, the ability to search by directory, filename, file type, application type, etc. We’ve arrived now at what seems like an effective general solution for smart indexing– but we will continue to examine the results and take feedback on how it can be further improved. All together, the much improved speed combined with the more accurate results provided us the opportunity to integrate a new report into our offering, one that makes keyword reports particularly useful for exploring how you spend your life on the computer.
A side note about terms: I use both the terms “search” and “key word filtering” due to the dual purposes of this capability. We find that predominantly users use this feature (and it’s persisted cousin, Custom Reports) for the purpose of generated reports filtered against desired match results: we call this use “key word filtering” because rather than trying to find something, you are trying to generate a filtered report with a sort of ad hoc grouping. However, users also sometimes use this feature simply to aggregate / locate time for a specific item: this is the “search” use. Finally, there is a semantic case to be made that, in general, web app users are more inclined to understand at first glance what goes in this field when it is labeled “Search”, despite that not really being its primary purpose.
A New Report: The Activity Details Report for Premium Users
A much asked for feature, our new Activity Details report provides an immediate view into the time you spend on your most urgent items, no matter what application or site you are on. If you are tracking your time in a project or for a customer, or want to understand, for example, how email time figures against your favorite design or engineering tool, this is a great resource. You can filter it with keywords to narrow down the view, and you’ll get reports that graph the top documents or pages, and a table that lets you see your app/site plus its documents. Critically, before it was impossible to see all the results of search filters in one view: you could never see matching documents/details from different apps and sites expanded together, and now you can. The old activity report is now called the Activity Summary report if you want a less noisy summary.
Navigation Changes: Integrating Search / Key Word Filtering into Regular Use
In conjunction with the above changes, we’ve rationalized how the site navigation responds to your searches and key word filtering. Again, this is an attempt to combine our own analysis with your feedback, and may be tweaked over time.
- From any report view, a new search (as in, clicking the search button) lands you on the Activity Details page. This provides you with immediate feedback for quality of your search results. Non-premium users still land on the Activities Summary page.
- Clicking search on the dashboard leaves you on the dashboard, with filtered results
- Once a search is active, it becomes sticky: if you navigate to Time reports using the side navigation, or click the “view complete report” links on dashboard widgets, your current search filter is preserved
- When viewing Activity reports, the search filter is preserved for Application or Site items linked in the table results. For example, if you search for keywords like “Seattle Atlanta”, you get a list of all apps and sites that have either of those words in their name or document details; if GMail was in the results, and you clicked the item “GMail” anywhere it occurs in the app/site column, you would get a report of all GMail items with the same keywords in its subjects and details.
- To clear out a search filter from affecting your Time Report browsing, simply click “Clear Search Filter [x]” and your screen is reloaded with the filter applied, and it is removed from all navigation points.
- Note: at this time links click *inside* the graphs themselves are not preserving the keywords, we’re continuing to explore sensible behavior for this case.
Thanks for your patience and feedback as we improve RescueTime!
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Protip: Keeping track of “sometimes productive” sites…
January 6, 2012 — Robby MacdonellOne 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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Data Driven New Year’s Resolutions
December 29, 2011 — jasongrimesGearing up for a Productive New Year – What are your New Year’s Resolutions?
It’s that time of the year when many fellow RescueTimers and other professed Lifehackers begin to look back at their work and accomplishments to measure what was completed in 2011 and what is on deck for 2012. Since joining RescueTime as the VP of Product Marketing earlier this year in May 2011 I’ve logged 1120 hours in RescueTime in total. Now that I know what I’m doing with my time and my personal patterns of productivity, I want to set out what I’m going to accomplish in 2012. Before answering this question let’s take a look back at 2011.
According to RescueTime in 2011 I spent the majority of my time:
- Buried in email – 200+ hours.
- 50+ hours doing RescueTime Support (answering emails, feature requests, bugs and voicemails).
- 100+ hours of food (includes lunch, coffee and sometimes dinner).
- 50+ hours chatting with my co-workers and colleagues.
- 50+ hours of meetings.
- 30+ hours of using my Social Media toolset, Hootsuite.com.
1100 hours is impressive, but when you realize that I had the potential to log close to 1600 hours I would have had a much clearer picture of my time. I plan to spend the next year logging more of my time – even the mundane stuff. For example when I’m not working productively I need to mark the time as Family or another similar category that demonstrates I have spent time away from work and everything needs to be tracked. Additionally, I plan to set some goals for hitting specific task related objectives, like 1 hour in business intelligence. Let’s look at a graph for some more ideas.
- I’m not spending enough time on our company blog – blog.rescuetime.com. My goal is to create 2 blog articles a month this next year and institute a RescueTimer of the Month program, posting of FAQ and sample real world examples of how RescueTime could benefit other knowledge workers.
- I’m a rabid fan of OSX’s sticky notes and I spent approximately 12 hours in it this year, but I need to move more of the ideas noted there to action, so I need to dig through them to review and prioritize.
- Phone calls – I’m an iPhone user and right now we do not have a client that supports call logging like our Android counterpart. In the meantime, I can log offline time as Phone Call – I just need to get in the habit of better documenting it.
- Hosted Google Docs – not entirely sure what to make of this statistic. At RescueTime we all share Google Apps accounts with access to a central Hosted Google Docs for knowledge share such as best practices, design docs, customer testimonials, but over the last 4 years many of these docs have grown outdated and we’ve relied on tribal knowledge. There needs to be a consistent effort to document what’s important and reusable. And whatever is usable and would benefit customers needs to be posted on our online support site at help.rescuetime.com or our company blog.
What are my New Year’s Resolutions given the data above?
Knowing that my job is very communication intensive what are the things I can do to improve my productivity for the upcoming 2012 year?
- Utilize Inbox Zero and Get Things Done to respond to the most important emails first – reduce inbox time sink.
- Develop a social media strategy that leverages the fewest amount of tools and time to accomplish the required tasks.
- Keep working with RescueTime development team to put the data closer to our users! Not just PC, Mac and Android, but iPhone, iPad and Linux clients as well. Once we have a complete offering almost all of my time will be completely tracked.
- Help close more sales of RescueTime Team Edition accounts utilizing Skype to have the necessary global reach. Currently Skype only consumes 5 hours of my time for the year – I expect this number to grow next year and potentially utilize Google’s new Hangout features.
- Create a smooth onboarding process for Team Accounts. We need videos, tutorials, customer reviews. Many of these docs will be hosted in our Google Docs for RescueTime.
- Analyze moving our support system to Assistly from Tender. Right now, we require a login to get support which prevents those with login problems from working to resolve their issues. Assistly could give us new functionality that will allow us to more easily connect with our customers.
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That awesome little data collector we all carry around in our pockets…
December 28, 2011 — Robby MacdonellLately, there’s been a lot of stuff in the news about Carrier IQ and how it’s software has been collecting all kinds of data from your mobile phone. A lot of people are freaked out about it, and rightfully so. It’s apparently done without consent, and it’s not really clear what the data is used for. It’s kind of sad, really, to see such a negative high-profile story about your phone’s ability to collect data about you.
As a fun counterpoint, here are some ways that awesome little data collector we all carry around with us can be used the right way, to make your life easier or help you learn awesome stuff about yourself.
Easy to use apps:
Glympse: Never have another drawn-out sms conversation with someone you’re traveling to meet with. Just send them a Glympse, and let your phone keep them updated on your progress.
Google Latitude: Automatically track and share your location. It gets pitched as more of a social application, but what I find the most interesting is the history dashboard. Another awesome trick is the ability to automatically check-in at places you frequent. For example, I keep a log of the number of times I go to the coffee shop down the street from my apartment. I keep a similar log of how often I go to the gym. The coffee shop wins.
Placeme: A new app that takes Latitude’s auto-checkins and expands on them. It tries to automatically capture, categorize, and quantify everywhere you spend your time. It’s pretty cool, but seemed like it was KILLING my phone’s battery so I stopped using it after a few days.
RescueTime: (shameless plug here, sorry) People are spending more and more time on their mobile devices. RescueTime for Android gives an understanding of which apps you are using the most. (I use the Reddit app on my phone about twice as much as I do on my computer, for instance)
Harder to use apps (but still awesome):
Here’s a couple that can be really powerful, but require some extra legwork to get something useful from the data.
MyTracks: Much more robust location tracking than Google Latitude. Every few seconds, it records your latitude, longitude, elevation and velocity. There are some visualizations you can see within the app itself, but you can also export the data. That’s the part I find interesting. I used it to do a month-long study of my transportation habits.
Cellbots Sensor Data Logger: One of the most robust data collection applications of them all. Gather measurements from all available sensors on your phone, as well as recording video or taking time lapse images. I haven’t used it for anything, but it’s good enough for NASA, so that’s gotta count for something:
What did I miss? What’s your favorite data collector app?
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Have a Productive New Year – Split a year of RescueTime Pro with your friends!
December 19, 2011 — jasongrimesHoliday Special: Refer a friend and get 6 months free.
For a limited time, you can give your friends a 50% discount on their first year of RescueTime. When they sign up, we’ll give you six free months of RescueTime Solo Pro too. Everyone wins!
How it works: Share your invite link with your friends, colleagues, etc. When they visit with that link, they will be able to sign up for a year of RescueTime Solo Pro for 50% off the normal price. When they sign up, we will add six months of Solo Pro credit to your account as well.
Find out your Referral link right www.rescuetime.com/accounts/referrals (Screenshot below)
Some fine print about the Give six months, Get six months promotion…
- There is no limit on how many accounts you can refer. (in other words, you can earn yourself a lot of free time)
- Offer is valid from December 19, 2011 to January 6, 2012. Any referrals outside of those dates will not be eligible for the discounted signup rate.
- If you refer someone and they sign up for a Solo Lite (free) plan, they obviously won’t get a discount, but we will give you two weeks of credit on your account.
- There is no free trial when someone takes advantage of the 50% discount.
- Team accounts are not eligible for this promotion.
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Changes and Improvements to RescueTime Search
December 16, 2011 — Mark WolgemuthWe’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!