Rescuetime Comes out of Beta

One of the more anticipated Seattle startups rescuetime, a personal time tracking system for Windows and Mac is available for people to download and use. So now if your boss thinks you are lazy and wants to punish you for it, you can pull up your own personal time statistics and see which parts of the day are the greatest time sucks, and which things are done quickly and efficiently.

The bonus side to that is that you can show that you are doing good things if you are really doing good things. The good part is that you can pause collection if you are doing things that are a natural time waster like on line games (unless you work in on line games), the program also times out on its own if you get up and walk away from the computer. The cooler part is that the reporting engine is web based.

If you wanted to monitor a team, you can set up each computer with an individual account, pay the fees and licensing and get a real good idea of who is working and who is not working in the office. This type of setup can also allow the company to monitor productivity across a group, or workspace, which is important when working on time and materials types of work.

Because the data is web based, it can be screen scraped, meaning you can put this in a spread sheet, a database or other central point to manage time, hours, interaction across a group.

If you are interested in checking out how productive your work force is, set baselines for groups or individuals, then this very cool chunk of software could be the best way to set out and find productivity loopholes, time sinks, and other things that could be costing the team time to complete projects.

Currently, it doesn’t get all too specific about what you’re doing other than the program’s name or tag. But for web browsers, it will track what domain name you’re on as well (IE, FF, Safari). In part this limitation is because of RescueTime’s privacy concerns and in part because RescueTime can’t yet recognize what file is open. They don’t want to play Big Brother, so users can always delete time entries or shut off the program for some alone time. However, since they only list the domain you’re surfing, your stats will probably see a lot of time on Google and Yahoo since they don’t recognize these sub domains. Source: Techcrunch

As the product matures, and they add more functionality in the system, because group and team time tracking would be great for project managers to have, with just a few settings, there are ways to work around the limits noticed in the software. There are some things that would be even more interesting when they add functionality that many managers would be interested in seeing. Like collective reports across groups and teams, knowledge of what programs are doing (compiling code can take hours, so what did they do when they were compiling code?), and some other things that would extend the product beyond the boffo stage.

For a fresh out of beta project though, and if you are curious, this is something that is worth checking out. The potential in this program is impressive, the better part, it is a Seattle startup. You can get to their website here.