I have been looking for a time manager to help make my time at work more productive. The problem with most of them is it takes time to track your time. It’s always a hassle for me. Remembering to start and stop clocks, enter time and projects…I have never been able to do it consistently. Well I have found my time management savior in a service called RescueTime. What is RescueTime? Here is their official definition:

“RescueTime is a software tool that allows businesses and individuals to understand exactly how they spend their time and attention– and helps them spend it more effectively.”

Well that doesn’t really give you the good stuff. I signed up for an account, downloaded their Data Collector, set some configurations on their website and that was it, maybe 30 minutes. At the end of the day this thing told me what I was doing all day. The sites I visited, how long I was in Visual Studio, Photoshop, Tortoise SVN…everything. I always thought I spent too much time with email, this proved I’m an email junkie. It even had a pop up that asked what I was doing when I didn’t have any activity on my computer every 5 minutes or so. It pop’s up and you click a button to say you were in a meeting, on the phone, whatever…include your notes and keep working. Talk about time saver.

If you really need to track things at a project or task level you can go on the website and update the records for specific projects. It even has a filter that will auto assign time to a project based on the file you are working on. This thing is awesome.

On top of that, they provide you with a decent dashboard and good reports. For you competitive types, they even tell you how you compare to other users of the system. They will also email you a weekly report if you want them too.

Lastly, if you are a business owner or manager that wants to track the productivity of your staff, you can require this. Have everyone sign up for an account and install data collector (it works on PC and Mac). Then everyone can set up a common set of categorization and productivity levels for activities based on their job. This would allow you to compare productivity across your organization or team.

Now my needs may not be yours. I only need something to give me an overview of how I spend my time so I can be conscious of spending it more wisely. If you need a tool to track time for billing purposes, this may not be your tool.

Hey, I probably spent too much time writing this and I don’t want to mess up my efficiency summary…I‘m in the top 9% of users right now :).  So, I will leave the rest for you to go check out for yourself – http://www.rescuetime.com.

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