Ask HN: A decent competitor to RescueTime

I used to use RescueTime to track how I was spending time on my computer as well as blocking things that were distracting but I had so many problems with it I gave up. I see there’s this thing ManicTime—about ManicTime on Lifehacker—but that’s for Windows only.

The problem for me is that RescueTime is pretty much exactly what I want. It’s in the cloud, works on Windows and Mac, allows me to block things I don’t want to be distracted by, etc. But the team behind the product just seem to be a bit incompetent. I’ve been using it for years and I’ve seen little to no improvement. Last time I used it the blocking features had broken completely for me, it took them forever to implement a weak—read: of no use—feature for recording time spent on specific projects instead of in specific applications, they had a serious bug on their website that prevented a particular feature from working which they hadn’t even noticed until I told them about it.

The dream is for my computer to keep information of what I’m doing:

  * which programs I’m using
  * which files I have open
  * which folders those files are in
  * which websites I’m visiting
  * the emails I’m reading/writing and to whom
  * relationships between these things that give 
    greater insight than those things on their own

…store this in an organized way that I can train and improve and present useful statistics to me. (Couldn’t the first three on this list be achieved with some systems programming roughly equivalent to the implementations of ps and lsof UNIX commands? It can’t be that hard.) Then later you could also start thinking about making this work on smartphones.

As an idea for a startup this seems like a complete no-brainer to me. If you are someone who has the capability to get a reasonably sized team of actual good developers with some vision and discipline together then you can probably trounce the existing competition and there must be tons of people who need this kind of functionality.