Rebecca Beltran's dashboard

The tracking of "writing email" vs. "working on other things in MS Word" option would be hugely helpful. If I'm writing a paper, it's being productive; but email, not so! :) It would be a huge boon to actually know how much time I'm spending writing emails. Many thanks! – Emma, on May 11, 2008 07:50

I'm with Mike.

Yep-- you can open the data collector app, click the privacy tab, and enable the whitelist. Details are at:

http://rescuetime.com/whitelists – Tony, on May 07, 2008 20:27

You can open the YML files with any text editor (Notepad would work).

Our servers are pretty hard hit this AM-- we're investigating the issue. Theoretically, your data collector could be trying to push data to our servers and failing for several minutes, which COULD result in some lost time. We're working on that.

Another issue is that that Outlook, when opening up a "compose" window, is actually (technically) opening up Microsoft Word. So if you are seeing low outlook time and high MS-Word time, that'd be the culprit there.

We're working on building an exception case that basically says, "if Word opens and the window title is 'Outlook Compose' record it in RescueTime is Outlook time, even though it's really Word".

The switch back and forth idea is a cool one. We'll definitely be showing that!

It does show some time, but not much. I don't get many long emails at this address, and typically my first 20-30 minutes at work is checking through those, so I would expect to see more than the 9 minutes it has reported for this morning.

My dashboard was updated 2 minutes before I pulled these results, btw.

I might be switching back and forth so much between applications during my email time that I really AM only spending 9 minutes a morning in the app, but I'd be surprised about that.

The windows logs are .yml files and my pc doesn't know what to do with them. What viewer do I need?

Oh, and it would be interesting to see how much time I spend switching back and forth between my applications trying to find the right one each day. I imagine that feature would be a ways down the road, but it would be cool!

Rebecca

Hey Rebecca-

Does it show NO outlook time? Or a lower than expected #?

RescueTime pushes data at regular intervals, but it's not real time. On your dashboard, it should say (below the nav to the right) something like: "Last update from your computer received 5 minutes ago." How recent is that #?

Also, RescueTime will idle out at 2m of no keyboard and mouse activity. If you're reading/digesting large emails, it's possible that it'd undereport-- but it's rare to read a long email without SOME mouse movement (or scrolling).

On a Mac, you can find the log files at
Macintosh HD:[username]:Library:RescueTime:Logs

On a PC, you can find the log files at:

C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data\RescueTime.com\logs

If you see peculiarities, you can always look at the files (which are a touch geeky but are readable in any text editor) for the time period in question to see what is actually being sent.

Is there still a whitelist? I can't find it and would like to try that.