Mark Barnes's dashboard

Mark Barnes reported a problem in RescueTime on August 30, 2009 06:56:

I'm close to giving up on Rescue Time...

I'm close to giving up on Rescue Time. The removal of tags has almost broken it for me. Categories seem very arbitrarily applied, and the thought of going through all my data, creating categories, and re-ranking for productivity seems just too much - doubly so when I have to do it a month at a time, and can no longer do it for all time, or even a year. How can RescueTime assume that all of us consider the same websites to give us the same level of productivity?

Mark Barnes reported a problem in RescueTime on December 22, 2008 23:57:

Notepad++ not logging on Vista

I use notepad++ on Windows Vista almost every day. I've noticed that it's not showing up in Rescuetime, though everything else sees to log correctly (or at least it hasn't logged since February 24. Is there anything I can do to try and find out the problem?

Mark Barnes replied on March 29, 2008 20:30 to the idea "Feature request: tag renaming" in RescueTime:

This was added a while ago. It's on the tags page now.

Mark Barnes reported a problem in RescueTime on March 29, 2008 20:28:

Renaming a tag removes the productivity score

If you rename a tag, the productivity score (-2, -1, 0, +1, +2) is lost.

Mark Barnes replied on March 18, 2008 14:16 to the problem "Shows in ALT+TAB on startup" in RescueTime:

Still here in 1.0.0.46

Mark Barnes started following the problem "Shows in ALT+TAB on startup" in RescueTime.

Mark Barnes replied on March 09, 2008 23:02 to the question "Ignoring Applications in RescueTime" in RescueTime:

This new whitelisting option doesn't work for me. I want to be able to send ALL my data to RescueTime, and then decide once it's there what's important and worth tagging. Every non-tagged site can be 'auto-tagged' as browsing, or whatever. I'd like then to be able to click on this tag and get the more detailed breakdown so I could then tag individal sites if their use started growing.

Mark Barnes reported a problem in RescueTime on March 03, 2008 22:54:

Bug: Tag renaming doesn't update goals

If you rename a tag that you use in a goal, it doesn't update on the goals screen, so your goal ends up not tracking.

Mark Barnes shared an idea in RescueTime on March 03, 2008 22:40:

Please order tags alphabetically when tagging

Please, please, please can you order tags alphabetically when tagging. Like most users, I tag in bulk. So I go to the tag screen, and locate my tag - let's see it's on the fourth line near the right. I tag a few things with it. Then the darn thing moves, it's on the third line somewhere near the middle. Then nothing for a while, then *BANG* it's gone again. Where is it? Second line? No, third line still, but on the left.

Well, you get the idea. It's very frustrating. I know you're placing the most used tags at the top, and I know I can bulk tag now, but that's no always how I work.

(If you don't want to alphabetise tags, at least fix the order until I refresh the page.)

Mark Barnes shared an idea in RescueTime on February 21, 2008 23:09:

Three simple suggestions

(1) Have the "Time Spent" graph on "Forever" start at the date I started using RescueTime, not at May 21 2007.

(2) Allow me to quickly visit a website from it's tag page. Sometimes I can't remember which website is which from the domain name alone. I'd like to be able to visit it quickly in a new tab so I can check it out.

(3) When tagging an app, I'd like the tags in alphabetical order. I have about 20 tags, and I find it difficult to find the ones I want - especially when their order keeps changing.

Mark Barnes replied on February 17, 2008 01:38 to the idea "Widget that can be shared on websites.." in RescueTime:

This has obviously now been launched. But can I suggest that more options are added to it. Two options that would be needed before I can use the widget would be:

(1) I choose how many apps are shown (10 is too many, particularly in the narrow version.)

(2) There's an option for "last seven days" or similar.

Mark Barnes started following the discussion "Wanted: Windows users to perform Alpha testing" in RescueTime.

Mark Barnes replied on February 02, 2008 22:30 to the problem "New Dashboard Interface is a Step Backwards" in RescueTime:

You'll never keep all of us happy. But these options will give you a better chance.

1) The "simple" solution to this is to allow users to re-arrange their panels, a la iGoogle or Facebook. (I've using simple to mean "simple from the users perspective". I understand that this may require some quite complex javascript).

2) Put the "old" table that dartman misses so much as the hover text on "view all").

3) Allow us to choose "Bar chart/Table/Both" in an options setting.

For what it's worth, I agree that goals takes up too much real estate, but on balance I like the new design.

Mark Barnes shared an idea in RescueTime on February 02, 2008 22:24:

Subset tags

I've never used more than one tag for an app/site. The reason? I don't want my graph to be reporting double or triple what I'm doing. That's confusing.

But your new subsets graph is very interesting. I like it. But I can't use it, because I won't double-tag my apps, because I don't want Rescue Time telling me that I worked for 36 hours yesterday.

However, if I could select an option which allowed me to promote one tag as the 'main' tag for an app, with the others as sub-tags - that would be amazing.

Otherwise, I'll have to miss out on subset tags, and stick with "Web browsing - personal", "Web browsing - work", etc.

Mark Barnes replied on January 28, 2008 07:27 to the idea "Feature Request: Goals/Alerts per week" in RescueTime:

I also suggest that you add an option for minutes, or allow decimals. I need to create a goal:

I want to spend less than 30 minutes each day on social networking

!

Mark Barnes shared an idea in RescueTime on January 23, 2008 22:23:

Feature Request: Goals/Alerts per week

I like the new goals feature, but it doesn't really suit me. I sift my focus through a variety of "jobs" throughout the week, so can't create goals on a per-day basis. But I would love to know whether I had spend x number of hours per week on a particular task. Could you add "week" to the "day/weekday" options currently available?

Realworld example from my dashboard:
Goal: more than 1 hour per day
Status: Success 1/4 days so far this week
(average of 1 hr 0 mins/day)

To me, you see that's success. Rescue time counts it as 75% failure.

Mark Barnes replied on January 23, 2008 09:50 to the idea "Feature Request: Treat untagged browsing as..." in RescueTime:

Sounds great. For what it's worth, My top ten apps only represent 55% of my time, and my "untagged apps" are my fourth largest "tag" on the new bar chart. That's despite me tagging almost everything I've spend more than five minutes on.

Mark Barnes reported a problem in RescueTime on January 23, 2008 09:46:

Bug report: Can't untag a phrase

The helpful bit of javascript which handles the "edit tags" can't cope with tags that are phrases. If you click on a tag to remove it, tagged phrases are not removed - only single word tags are. This is presumably do to the single quotes which are added to the form field, but not expected by the javascript.

Mark Barnes shared an idea in RescueTime on January 22, 2008 21:49:

Feature Request: Treat untagged browsing as...

I tag a lot of websites I visit, but there's no way I'm going to tag them all - and nor should I.

So any websites I don't tag as something else should probably be tagged as "browsing" or the like.

It would be great if there were an option so that all untagged browsing could be treated as if it were tagged with whatever tag I specify.

(This obviously wouldn't apply to untagged applications.)

Mark Barnes replied on January 21, 2008 09:05 to the problem "Bug report: 500 error when you try and show a deleted application" in RescueTime:

Thanks.

I know about the ignore functionality. I just wondered whether screensavers should be ignored by default. On the PC, anything with .scr is a screensaver, if there's no other way of knowing.