bfioca

>...it’s a useless tool. I don’t like collaborating with chronic liars who aren’t able to openly point out knowledge gaps...

I think a more correct take here might be "it's a tool that I don't trust enough to use without checking," or at the very least, "it's a useless tool for my purposes." I understand your point, but I got a little caught up on the above line because it's very far out of alignment with my own experience using it to save enormous amounts of time.

I love this approach. It feels far more like brand and messaging tuning and less like search engine algorithm hacking.

Amazing work by a colleague of mine. Incredibly useful to have a metric and formula for how to decide when to apply AI agent technology.

Thanks! We decided we’d give existing users the choice to upgrade because it’s quite different. If you want to migrate your account, you can do it from here: https://www.rescuetime.com/new_rescuetime

Oh wow that’s a super good idea.

It’s a webview that runs a super small HTML page with vanilla Javascript. (No electron!) We looked and it’s not noticeably larger of a runtime footprint as the old version.

Thanks for sticking with us! We've just hired someone to help with our Windows app who loves linux, so look for improvements to both of those in the future. Right now we're very focused on new features for our new version. Which you won't be able to try unless you migrate your account. You can do that from here http://www.rescuetime.com/new_rescuetime (but please note that it's quite a bit different - although you can see your old dashboard after you migrate by going to /dashboard)

Sorry about that - pricing is $12/month or $78 if paid annually. We're going to add it back to the site - it was on the old version of the account create page before we added the new survey and we legit didn't think about it.

Thanks for your comment - really glad to have you over the years!

I will say that lots of what you’re describing doesn’t exist in a form you’re used to in the new version, so you might not want to switch just yet. The good news is it’s a manual process to upgrade, so if you don’t want to switch you don’t have to do anything and things will stay the same for you.

Thanks for saying so! So great to hear.

Cool! Thanks for being a happy customer! And sure - (copying from a different response below) you can see all of the data that we track by looking at the diagnostics window in the app: https://help.rescuetime.com/article/50-how-can-i-reset-my-re...

In short we track the name of the application you're using, and the window title OR the URL of the website you're on (if you're in a recognized browser). We query the OS to detect what's in focus and whether or not the computer has gone idle to track time spent on a particular thing. We also use crowdsourced data collected over the years to understand what categories applications and websites are (meeting tools, communication tools, design/coding/business tools, etc.) All of our data is never used individually, only analyzed in aggregate in an anonymized way. We're compliant with GDPR rules. Here's our privacy policy for more information: https://www.rescuetime.com/privacy

I’m not entirely certain that’s true. Companies that are that restrictive are really judicious about costs and how much they’re willing to pay.

You’re describing my own situation, exactly. The years when I wasn’t at RescueTime I ran into problems like this and part of the reason why I wanted to help redesign the app was because it just wasn’t helping me out with these problems. Thank you for sharing your story.

Not yet - iOS is really locked down. We’re hoping to get something working at some point. Really need better access to Screen Time APIs though.

They’re still there, we just haven’t finished redesigning that page for the new version. For now, you can go here: https://www.rescuetime.com/anapi/setup/overview

Thanks for this. Yeah, it’s definitely entirely different. The transition is going to be tricky at first for folks used to the old version but so far it seems to be making sense to new people. Thanks for those notes. iCal is something we can technically support but it doesn’t post changes to webhooks so you’d have to manually sync every time. :/

Potentially, although not necessarily. There are many many years of quantified-selfers signing up to track all of their data.

Actually yes! We are working on iterating on Focus Sessions and blocking (especially communications apps) right now.

Application name, window title, website URL (if in a browser), and time spent in activity. All anonymized when analyzed in aggregate.

It's true and it often depends on things like company size (2 hours or less for large companies, 3-4 hours for small startups) and role (managers are lucky to hit 2 and ICs can usually get to 3 when they're not in meetings all day).

Oh cool! Don't worry - we don't have any plans to change the API right now (other than potentially adding to it in the future).

Thanks so much! I hope you like this new version. Much more about building good habits and less about having something telling you over and over how much time you’re spending on Hacker News. :D

Those are great ideas. I love the new Focus features in Monterey, too. One thing that MacOS can’t do is tell you when to stop working for the day once you’ve gotten enough focus work done. That feature is the one I use the most in this new version and I rely on it every day.

It’s true that unfortunately over the years there have been enough bad actors where I can’t describe our commitment to privacy in a way that easily instills trust. We’ve definitely benefitted from many users’ trust over the years in that we’ve been able to build a product that’s smarter about the best way to work for most people. Really looking forward to packaging it in a way that will make you feel comfortable.

Great note about the signup flow not messaging that. We’ll correct that for sure. In terms of 30 minute increments, that’s not currently supported due to super annoying technical reasons around the way we’ve structured our database. Something else we’re working on.

Totally true (and unfortunate) that so many founders go down that path. If it helps, we've never really seen a strong pull revenue-wise to go down that direction. We strongly prefer to make beautiful premium software that helps people. That kind of corporate spyware would likely need an enterprise product/sales team, and is generally a kind of race-to-the-bottom of price and (honestly boring to build) commodity features. As founders, there are plenty of more interesting spaces for us to work in instead of that and none of us are motivated to work in that direction.

Definitely planning on working on it. Thanks for chiming in to help us prioritize this.

Thanks so much! So happy to hear.

I'll check it out. :)

Yikes, that's not good, sorry. I wonder if there's something specific with your setup, we haven't had any problems like that from other users today. If you could email help@rescuetime.com I'd love to help figure out what happened.