I recently talked about my connectivity obsessions, knowing that I am not alone in this sort of thing and that many of us wonder how we can overcome such obsessions.
Well it turns out that a young fellow I admire a good bit, Paul Stamatiou, recently wrote about an online application that helps you track your time. The application is called RescueTime, and I have been trying it out for a few days.
It’s available for both Mac and Windows. My use of it is limited right now to my Mac, because that is where I spend virtually all of my computer-based online time. (I say computer-based, because I also connect via my BlackBerry Curve and iPod Touch … RescueTime does not track that use.)
The app is easy to install and setup, and has several interesting reports. One of my reports is shown below:
This view is just for today. My view for the previous two days had much, much more time spent in coding, development, and research, which was mostly associated with moving to a new server.
You may have noticed that it has large percentages for uncategorized time and time management. The reason for the latter is that I have assigned RescueTime to a Time Management category. The reason for the large percentage of uncategorized is that I have visited a lot of new web pages today, and have not gone into the admin panel to assign them to categories (and might not).
Now, this application will not automagically make you connect any less. It does give you a sense of where you spending your time, though. And, if you do not like what you see, it gives you something specific to work on instead of just giving yourself a fuzzy goal of “less time online.”
In my particular case, the app has not given me any results that are insightful enough for me to really continue using it. I may give it a few more days, but I doubt that it is going to be very insightful for me. Your mileage may vary.
Note that it does have one potential downside: you could conceivably spend more time categorizing stuff than it would wind up saving you. So you have to watch out for this sort of thing. I personally am not going to spend the time categorizing a hundred different web pages … I know the bulk would fall into the category of research but I am not going to spend 15 or 20 minutes categorizing them individually.
Of course, as we have talked about before, a lot of software has the potential to suck you into tinkering with it to the point that you waste more time than you would ever gain from using the software.
Anyway, RescueTime is interesting. I am pleased to have experimented with it, and it let me see that I wasn’t spending as much time wastefully as I had imagined. Would be nice if it tracked my BlackBerry and iPod Touch time, though. A lot of my Twitter use is done on those devices.
Your thoughts?
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