jaapstronks's dashboard

I would also like to be able to modify existing entries. For example, time spent watching training videos in Windows Media Player gets "lost" becasue the computer looks idle to Rescue Time (becasue I don't wiggle the mouse every few seconds while I watch the video).

I think the ability to manually add/edit time recorded in RescueTime is going to be critical if you want to use RescueTime to help you complete your timesheet at the end of the week.

Thanks; I'm looking forward to features making it possible to compare myself to people with related jobs. Because I have not been very productive these last few days, but since all of my work is being done at this computer, working for 4 hours (instead of 8) makes me more productive than almost everybody else, while in reality, I am not.

I must add, though, that the productivity measurement is biased by design. That's because the -2 to 2 scale doesn't match the nature of productivity.

Here's why: one must actively tag applications / sites and grade these tags in order to capture one's productivity. The default value of a tag is 0. But what is that, really? When I'm working, I'm using applications graded as 2. But what is 0 compared to 2? 0 is 'nothing', but it's not being idle. It's being unproductive. But what is -2, then?

In short, -2 to 2 doesn't make sense. It's a dimension too many. Watching YouTube is the same as being idle. But there shouldn't be something that's even more unproductive than being idle (or watching YouTube). That would only make sense if time could be destroyed: a score of 1 for reading a textbook to learn French, 0 for being idle, -1 for playing a mind-numbing game that makes me instantly forget the French words I just learned. But that usually doesn't happen.

So, I think tags should be graded from 0 to someting. Perhaps 0 to 1, you're working or you're not working.

But still: not everyone grades their tags. I think, many are tracking applications, or sets of websites, I suspect. It's a great system to only track how many minutes you've spent watching YouTube or using Microsoft Office applications, without the need to rank applications on the productivity scale. So, if people don't bother to actively grade their tags, their productivity is rated as being (close to) zero, making even non-productive people who bother to grade their tags (since they ARE interested in being more productive) seem more productive than they really are. Yes, that's likely: people with productivity problems use this software for tracking especially that; they are unjustly compared to other productive people who are not interested in grading their tags.

Or do you only measure people who have graded tags? Still, many of those could use the scale in unintended ways that make sense for them personally, but which unintentionally makes the aggregation of data impure. Because, if I'm at 98 with only a 4 hours of productive work, the average must be between 2 or 3, tops. If so, I don't think the aggregated productivity average holds much meaning. I wish you good luck with your efforts to make the comparison more meaningful, good to hear you're working on that!

For now, productivity and efficiency scores are based on the RT population as a whole... So, roughly speaking, if your score is 98 you're roughly better than 98% for that period.

We're still working a bit on the formula and, as RescueTime groups improve, it obviously gets exciting to see how you compare to your peers (rather than all RescueTimers).

The hi and lo scores refer to the little spark chart-- the last 10 weeks. So that's your hi and lo scores for that period.

Just to clarify -- I am running ff 3.0b5 on Tiger, but my tracked time is only coming reliably from my Safari usage? So I should stop using FF?

I'm sorry, since FF3b5 didn't work (something I found out about on this forum), I went back here to see if Safari did work, according to forum users. I overlooked that your comment regarding 'issues with the most recent versions of Safari' is 6 months old. Thanks!

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

There should be no issues with Safari URLs reporting correctly. If you are seeing that as well as Firefox 3, then there may be something else going on.

Can you send me a couple of your uploaded logs with Safari and/or Firefox entries for me to review?

You're log files are located at Macintosh HD:[username]:Library:RescueTime:Logs

Send the last couple of log files from the uploaded directory to team@rescuetime.com and I'll see if I can determine what is going on.

Thanks

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

ditto! And what about adding time when I'm making phonecalls or taking care of my physical bookkeeping? I like the notion of tracking without data entry, but an option to manually add data should be easy to add and would be of great value for a lot of users, and could be ignored by people who are not interested in using it.

I'd like to add that this is becoming problematic. I have Firefox 3b5 and Safari, and it appears that both browsers don't report correctly. I feel too much for reverting to FF2...

I'm with Mike.