Jason Berberich's dashboard

I love the visibility that RescueTime gives me into how I spend my time. But, since the information it gives me is generally historic, it's usefulness is limited - at least in comparison to what it could be. i.e., in addition to telling me how I spent my time, help me in the moment to make good choices.

So here's my rough idea: Based on personal/team goals (or some other useful metric), tell me as I'm working (using a Growl-type message, for example) if I'm trending toward my goal (e.g., I want to spend less than 1/2 hour on feed reading, and I just spent 10 minutes on that) or away from a goal (e.g., I want to spend at least six hours on "work" during the workday, but I'm falling behind on that goal).

Also, I think there's an opportunity to add some game-style elements to RescueTime that could help motivate users. This could be based on the current efficiency scoring system, or something new, but I think it would be great to see a big green +2 fade into the corner of my screen after working on a "productive" task for some amount of time, or a big red -1 fade in after spending too much time on Facebook, etc. Give us our current score in the system tray or somewhere else we can glance at it so that we can adjust our work.

Not only would this real-time score help us immediately by motivating us to keep up our work (or to get back to it), but it'd be great to be able to try and beat our "personal best" scores, or those of our teammates.

I realize this idea adds a lot of new complexity to the client software, but think it would greatly increase the value of RescueTime by helping us really change how we work.

I recommend taking a look at the work of Raph Koster, author of "Theory of Fun for Game Design". There's also a great podcast with him on IT Conversations where he talks about applying game elements to non-game areas such as e-commerce websites, etc.