See How Much Time You Are Wasting With RescueTime

No matter how accurate RescueTime might be, it can only tell me what I've done after the fact (usually a week later when I check the report). As I wrote in my blog post here: http://inter-sections.net/2008/01/02/feedback when providing feedback, timeliness is very important. For an application trying to stop me from procrastinating, I think the time to do so is while I'm procrastinating - not a week later. A week later, the only effect is to make me feel bad about it. It's a bit like getting a Vodafone phone bill for £200 for the month that ended 60 days ago. At that point you can't do anything other than feel bad, it's far too late to correct the course.

Here's a constructive idea for the RescueTime team (which they may choose to implement or not): add a feature that turns the RescueTime widget into a little minder (trained on the data that you've fed it for so many months) that can tell when I've wasted a lot of time on sites like YCNews or other random sites today, and pop up a little message pointing that out to make me feel a little ashamed of it, so that it steers me back towards productivity before it is too late.

Now that would be something. And since RescueTime is integrated with a web service, chances are you could get people to pay a nominal sum for that service. If I tried it and it really was quite good at salvaging those odd days, here or there, that I waste procrastinating, I would grudgingly but willingly pay up to about $5/m for it.

The thing is that it tracks application names and not its content. For example, If I used TextMate for 5 hours (which is in the "Dev-Tools" category and set to be +2 productive) the app doesn't know for what I've used it. I could've used TextMate to do something totally unproductive. Even when I use TM for coding, how does the app know that I'm working on the project I should be working on? I use TextMate for so many things, its impossible to track if I'm using it productivly.

Same with websites, you can't tell the productivity of a domain if you don't analysize the content. Is wikipedia productive? It depends on the article. IRC and IM are also good examples. The app doesn't know if I'm using it to be productive or just chatting.

Then there's iTunes. I often leave it open, dim the screen and do non-computer stuff. After 500 hours of tracking, iTunes was my most "used" app because of this. Oh, and I set it to be productive -2, so the webinterface showed that I was very unproductive every month.

Even showing me how long I've used an app doesn't really increase my productivity. Here's a quote from one of pg's essays (disconnecting distraction):

"At first I tried rules. For example, I'd tell myself I was only going to use the Internet twice a day. But these schemes never worked for long. Eventually something would come up that required me to use it more than that. And then I'd gradually slip back into my old ways."

Same happens when showing me that I've used application X for Y hours. Shomething always comes up and I slip back.

Don't misunderstand this, I like the RescueTime guys and the work they've done, it's just that the idea of tracking application names/website uri's isn't perfect.