My time logged in Microsoft word is completely, utterly, uselessly, inaccurate

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  Tony, Official Rep, replied on February 20, 2008 23:56

  Heh-- well, we can't fault you for lack of courage.
  
  Regardless-- it MIGHT be an isolated data weirdness that never manifests again... You might ponder using it for a week and looking at a broader body of data to see if it looks wonky. Either way, thanks for trying us out.
  
  Cheers, -t

   

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  Tony, Official Rep, replied on February 20, 2008 23:01

  You may not have RescueTime's babies. :-)
  
  There are lots of possible alternate explanations! We have tens of thousands of RescueTime users who aren't reporting inaccurate data... My hope is that there is something wonky/unique about your experience/setup that we can track down and fix.
  
  RescueTime will not accept bad/corrupt records-- If you had one big uninterrupted slice of time in MS-Word and the data somehow got corrupted, this might give you some lost time in your graphs.
  
  So, here are ways you can help us, if you're game (you can respond here or drop the info to team@rescuetime.com):
  
  1) Tell me if your total time for the hour(s) in question are low. To see, click on "today" on the dashboard and look at the hour by hour graph at the bottom. If you are on your machine, those bars should be 55-60 minutes (accounting for a little idle time). If your total time is not low for the hours in question, click around in your top apps/tags to see what app(s) are filling up the slice of time that SHOULD be taken up by ms-word.
  
  2) Open the RT data collector (in your system tray), click the debug tab and scroll to the bottom. For any text there that is around the timeframe in question, do you see any failures? Non-failure state should look like: <failures type="integer">0</failures>. If you have any apps that are "ignored" in the system, they will correctly report as failures (as ignored apps aren't accepted by RT).
  
  3) Go to your logs directory. It's at C:\Documents and Settings\[your username]\Local Settings\Application Data\RescueTime.com\logs (if you are on windows) or Macintosh HD:<username>:Library:RescueTime:Logs (if you are on a Mac). You can poke around and find the file in question by sorting by date and looking at the files (in a text editor) to see the actual data getting sent. If you'd like, you can zip 'em up and send 'em to us and we'll do the digging (please give us a timeframe you were using Word), or you can dig around yourself.
  
  The question is: Is RescueTime artificially deciding that you are idle when you are not? Is there another application that you are alt-tabbing to that might be overreporting?
  
  Bonus points if you tell us your OS type/version and your version of Word...
  
  Thanks in advance for any help!
  
  Cheers, -t</username>

   

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