RescueTime Blog

blog.rescuetime.com · Company blog · on HN since 2007

RescueTime's company blog, with time-tracking data and posts on productivity, context switching, and work habits.

What HN saysCommenters cite it for productivity score methodology and a personal story of boosting productivity with the tool, and the Google Pac-Man cost post draws discussion.
36HN people shared it
9linked it in comments
121stories submitted
2.5Kstory points
3 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026

Most-shared posts

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    The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours
    2 people · 169 points · first shared 2010 · 59 comments on HN
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    Turning off the distracting parts of the Internet
    2 people · 26 points · first shared 2009 · 13 comments on HN
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    Work from Home Productivity Data
    2 people · 7 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
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    “No Pie Charts… Not Ever!” (says I)
    2 people · 1 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
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    Apple has removed us from the App Store
    1 people · 232 points · first shared 2018 · 174 comments on HN
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    The worst distractions are the ones we love
    1 people · 192 points · first shared 2018 · 52 comments on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

dreeves · 2013-09-30
I see someone suggested Beeminder in the comments of your post (thank you, whoever that was!). Also by the creators of Beeminder (me and Bethany Soule) is TagTime, which is related to your idea of periodic prompts. We call TagTime "stochastic self-sampling" or "time-tracking for space cadets". It's not super friendly (a huge pain to get working on Windows, for example) but it's on github here: http://tagti.me If you don't want to deal with TagTime (and I don't blame you) then just hooking up RescueTime to Beeminder is a great way to go. Here's what RescueTime says about Beeminder: http://blog.rescuetime.com/2012/11/27/give-your-productivity-goals-som…
coscreen · 2020-12-03
OP here - CoScreen offers multi-user screen sharing and simultaneous remote control for engineering teams like no other solution out there. After the awesome reception on HN a year ago, we're super excited to announce our completely newly designed & developed v1.0 release of CoScreen for macOS and our private alpha for Windows. Check it out here: https://coscreen.co [1] Problem: Today's video chat solutions are great if you enjoy awkward full-screen conversations, but are a productivity killer for development teams. The pandemic has turned endless, boring in-office meetings into endless, boring video calls. It’s also just too painful for engineering teams to wrangle with complex pull requests using a brittle string of tools like Zoom, Skype, Tmux, GNU screen, and a variety of IDEs. Solution: CoScreen enables pair/mob/team programming like no other solution and we believe it can reduce the cost of context switching by up to 80% [2] so you can focus on what actually matters - reviewing code, troubleshooting bugs, or building major new features. CoScreen is a desktop app that enables multiple users to share application windows with each other at the same time. You can think of it like a shared desktop where any user can interact with any shared window as if it were their own via remote mouse and keyboard to allow them to collaborate like never before (they can even copy and paste code across windows of different users). In addition to built-in video chat, and remote…
maneesh · 2021-09-29
Rescuetime changed my life -- I once hired someone to slap me in the face whenever I was unproductive on rescuetime -- and I ended up being all over the news because of it! https://blog.rescuetime.com/how-i-saved-4-hours-per-day-using-rescueti… Because of the experience, I built a wearable device company to make sure I stay productive -- we even integrate with rescuetime! (i'm getting vibrations right now whenever I'm in flow/90%+ productive). Thanks for building such awesome tech, and let me know if you'd like to work on an integration together! -Maneesh Sethi from pavlok
legostormtroopr · 2021-07-26
While this doodle is cute - I really have to wonder about the externalities of this that Google doesn't consider. They have effectively put a game in front of every search result, and are actively encouraging people to play. This has a real cost to productivity and attention. https://blog.rescuetime.com/the-tragic-cost-of-google-pac-man-4-82-mil…
work_hn · 2018-01-04
From how they measure the productivity score: http://blog.rescuetime.com/breaking-down-the-rescuetime-productivity-s… "But the bottom line is that the productivity score doesn’t tell you anything about what you actually produce. It’s simply a number that can give you an interesting baseline of where your attention is, but doesn’t tell 100% of the story. It’s a way to understand your patterns, and not a prescription for how you should be spending your time." So, this is basically an indicator of how much time you spend on an activity and not how "productive" you are. Like they say, productivity is a charged word. I wish there was a way to tag productivity and efficiency together.
Samuel_Michon · 2013-05-14
5 million hours of productivity lost in 1 day. The total is many times higher. http://blog.rescuetime.com/2010/05/24/the-tragic-cost-of-google-pac-ma…
jmonegro · 2009-11-14
I had used rescuetime in the past, but not for project tracking. I logged back in right now after 8 months of inactivity, and, behold, they implemented project tracking yesterday. Edit: Actually, it's a new, stand alone, product or something. http://blog.rescuetime.com/2009/11/13/rescuetime-for-project-time-trac…
webwright · 2009-09-15
http://blog.rescuetime.com/2009/08/19/turning-off-the-distracting-part… We're actually pretty close to this (just soft-launched our windows version-- mac version hot on its heels). Starting with focus "toggling" ("Shut of the bad parts of the internet for 30 minutes") and moving on to nudges ("let me know when I exceed 30m of news time") and blocking ("block social networking if I exceed X hours or X %"). Disabling the internet is a baby/bathwater thing for a lot of people, I think. There's too much value there to turn it off completely (research, etc).

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