Distinguish blocks of time on certain websites and apps

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.

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.

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.

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.