Cheryl Allin's dashboard

I've just signed up for RescueTime and this is the first thing I'm looking for - how to distinguish what projects - by File Folder, tag, Filename --something! A lot of us spend most of our time in MS Office Apps (imagine that!) and tracking by installed application is of little value to seeing how time is really being used.
As this thread has been going on for nearly a year, I was hoping to see an ETA in the near future. (it's 8/11/08 today) Are we getting close?

Closing this thread. This problem has been addressed in 1.0b4.3 or higher.

Cheryl: the first build with this fix and jumbo patch is out. We have not turned on automatic update yet because we did some massive changed under the hood and we are going to work with a 100 people sample over the next 24 hours to double check that there are no major regression before we turn the auto-update on.

You can manually upgrade by pointing your browser to:
http://update.feeddo.com/release/feed...

If you do, please let us know how it works out.

This has been fixed. The fix will go out with our jumbo patch in the next 2-3 days as part of 1.0b3.40. We will let you know when it is out. Thanks again for reporting this problem.

Thanks Cheryl. We can reproduce it now so we should be able to track it down and fix it. We will keep you posted.

Sorry, should have clarified. I go in to change preferences, change a field and when I click into another field, it automatically reverts to the original settings. Thanks for the quick response!!

Hi Cheryl. We will look into that. One question: do you see the preferences reverting as you click "return" or after the restart of the browser?

Note: there is not save button. the preference page "auto-saves" changes when you click on enter/return after making your change (a sign should show up saying so).

The reason I am asking this question is because I would like to know if it is a usability issue or if there is a bug preventing preferences to be saved (in which case, you would see them revert back to the default after restarting the browser).

I've gotten around this by creating my own proxy that fiddles with the time information in order to make it more useful. So I get times logged like excel_clienta and excel_clientb. If you're interested in trying out my proxy, send me an email at andrew at lunde dot com.

Positive is good. Plus, Morten misspelled "lose". :-P This is officially our most requested feature. We're doing some improvements on the groups/biz offering right now and doing some infrastructure improvements (to keep our servers from exploding due to growth)... After that, files/folders it is! – Tony, on May 07, 2008 21:32

I'd like to phrase it more positively than Morten: implement this and I want to give you money.

Tracking folders is a must, implement or loose me. :)

Along the lines of filenames in Excel, I would like to throw a vote out there for the solution you have open in Microsoft Visual Studio. Different solution files are used for different projects and it would be useful to me to see where I am spending my time, right now I just have a "Coding" tag.

On the way-- this feature was very popular on our recent feature survey, so we've bumped it up a bit on the priority list.

The additional tag by file/folder would be very useful. As an example I use excel for multiple projects and currently they are all lumped together under a single set of tags - it would be much more useful to get a breakout of this.

I agree. This was the first issue that became apparent as soon as I installed the software. The dashboard showed all the apps I'd been using but there's no way of telling what project I'm working on unless I can tag folders rather than apps. Like the first poster, I use my directory structure to group files associated with a particular project so would only need to tag folders and not individual files.

great idea.

You can potentially become the holy grail of timesheet solutions for businesses. I have tried quite a few timesheet software packages and all of them required too much overhead to keep up with a busy day at work. What many businesses need (in particular in the consulting / professional services area) is to identify accurately the time spent working on a specific client account or project. Here are some ideas on how to implement that:

a) Allow the user to right click on the RescueTime task bar icon to show an extra option called "Start Bucket Timing" that once selected will bring up a list of user configurable client/project tags. Click on the tag of your choice and all the time you spend from now on is allocated to that tag. When you are done, right click again and select "Stop Bucket Timing".

b) Using a file name or location to determine the bucket tag to use is excellent - except that everybody organizes files differently on their hard disk and name them in thousands of different manners. What would work for me is that if the path of the file I will work on contains a specific keyword that I'll define as a tag in your application, you will automatically add time spent editing/viewing that file to the tag. In other words, if I have c:\docs\peerant\testspecs.doc and c:\docs\simitel\funcspecs.doc with the tags "simitel" and "peerant" defined, the time editing funcspecs.doc will automatically be allocated to "simitel". My doubt is whether you can actually handle some of the more complex use cases like for example having several text files open simultaneously in a single Textpad text editor window - how will you know if I'm working on file A or file B?

If you can elegantly solve this problem your product will become a must-have for a lot of professionals fed up with the current timesheet solutions.

(sorry about the delay in response-- you fell through the cracks!)

This is a cool idea. I'm a little worried about the data-entry aspect of it-- we really want to minimize the amount of time required to get a lot of value from RescueTime (it's supposed to make you MORE productive-- not mire you in housekeeping work)...

One of the other ideas we're pondering is allowing users to bucket things by filename or potentially by directory. For example, if you were working on ANY document in the /clients/ folder, you could tag it as "work". If you were working on a document in /clients/acme-inc/ you could tag it as "work" and "acme"...

It's a delicate dance-- we're trying to keep it simple, but we definitely know our data could be a lot more detailed (and potentially a lot more useful!)