Recession-proof yourself (and your team)

If you want to measure productivity, a think a more holistic approach is in order. Time spent, lines of code, minutes in productive apps, all help zero in on it.

For jobs where cognitive effort is the fuel behind productivity, measuring such effort by time spent in a particular application or lines of code written over a fixed period of time strike me as at best a middling approximation to what is produced. The lines of code ,or the end artwork, or whatever creative output you see may be the result of an rather involved and complicated thought process. Sometimes I can spend hours banging my head against a problem, and make very little progress on it. Sometimes a solution will come to me after I focus on something else for a while and let my subconscious chew on the problem. Sometimes solutions to a problem involve doing things that look to most people like anything but productive work.

Honestly, I think you can gauge far more about your employees' productivity by talking to them about what they are working on than you will by looking at aggregates of a limited number of data points, and trying to get a numerical representation of productivity based on that. You're likely to get a more accurate and well-rounded idea of the employee's actual productivity, while at the same time improving their morale, motivation and lessening to the feeling that they are just another cog.

This is not to say RescueTime doesn't have value to the worker or the employer. I think the value is far greater for the employer who trusts the employee to manage their own productivity, perhaps recommending RescueTime to help that along, than it is for an employer who imposes such a tool on their employee as a mandatory productivity metric.