RescueTime is awesome

We’ve recently started using RescueTime in the company. I used it personally for a couple of weeks just out of curiosity and found that it was legitimately awesome, so I rolled it out for the whole TopHatMonocle empire (all 6 of us.) It’s been a fun experience.

First off, RescueTime neatly falls into the category of data porn. You get to see so much cool data that you just didn’t have access to before that it’s almost overwhelming. I spent a good hour just exploring all the crazy graphs I could generate by selecting different time intervals and categories – “I spent 12 minutes yesterday on Hacker News… hmmm… I thought it would have been more than that.”

Second, it confirmed my suspicion that I don’t get any work done during the day (i.e. 9-5.) Not to say that I don’t get things done – it’s just that everything I do falls into the vague category of management, rather than things like coding or designing. It’s almost hilarious looking at the graph above, I basically just start to ramp up around 4pm and then dip to zero productivity at around 7am with maybe an hour total work done during the day.

Another side benefit of RescueTime is that people start to compete on who can have more +2 productive time during the day. It becomes a kind of badge of honor to have x hours of productive time. Of course ideally you would compete on actual work done, but this is about as good a proxy for that as you can get – and previously there was just no way to access this data at all.