A FEW THOUGHTS

As one of the steps of altering the way I work to be more efficent and productive I have tested the service RescueTime. Basically it is an online service where you will find a dashboard presenting the data from your computer through an agent you download to your computer (Windows, Linux or Mac). The agent gathers data from your computer on what programs you are using, what websites you are visiting and by use of categories (that you can modify) identify how productive or how much work you get done. These data are shown in a great sample of graphs and charts making it real easy to see what pitfalls you easily go into during your day. It also provides a search-function where you can do a search on a single website or program to see how much time you have used on it for a period of time.

The service comes in versions for both individuals, business or schools. For business and schools there is a variety of options you can look deeper into, and it can of course be used for management information as well. For individuals you can choose between a free lite version and a pro version for $5 per month. I tested the free lite version but the pro version will give you deeper tracking, options to block webpages, alerts etc. When starting I recommend that you after a couple of days use go through the categories and tweak the different websites and programs to your use, so it will give you more precise output. The “downside” to this is of course that when using this it is really just all up to you to change your bad habits…