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I have a confession to make: I slack off tons at work. TONS. As time passes, it seems to be getting worse. I don’t know if I’m getting more lazy (probably) or if I’m not motivated about my work anymore (yeah, let’s not talk about that), but I find myself surfing the internet a lot at work. It’s becoming a problem and really hurting my productivity. Sometimes I even feel guilty about it and try to do work from home remotely, but then I just end up repeating the same slacker-ness in the comfort my own home.

Kelvin showed me this software called RescueTime, which is an internet-linked application that keeps track of your computer activities. It’s free; you just sign up for a RescueTime account, download and install a small application on your computer, and let it run in the background. It logs which application and web domains you’re looking at, collects that information, and puts it in graph form on webpage. Here’s the graph showing which applications and sites were taking up my time:

I do most of my work through Xwin32, which is why it dominates that graph.
This is my first day of using RescueTime, so it’s #3 today. I also got
distracted watching videos today, obviously.

At your RescueTime page, you can tag the sites you visit and applications you use, which helps present the data in an informative way to you, the user. I labeled all my major applications and sites with their general usage (email, blogs, etc.), but I also separated them into “work” and “not-work” since these two sets are what I’m concerned about most.

I hope I’m not fired for posting this.

You can also give productivity values to certain tags to get efficiency and productivity numbers, whatever those mean. Another feature I love is that it lets you set goals. One goal I set was an example goal they listed (which makes me feel better since it makes me think I’m not the only one who needs this as a goal) was spend at least 5 hours a day doing work. It’ll show you how you’re doing with your goal every time you check your RescueTime page, or it can also send you alerts. There’s also a “Groups” function where you can invite people to be in your group and share statistics of your work habits with each other. (I don’t think I’m quite ready to regularly share my laziness.) There might be more features I don’t know about, and I certainly hope they’ll add more features in the future.

Data isn’t taken when the computer is idle. And for the record, I started
RescueTime like half an hour after I got in :P (Though honestly, the first
thing I do when I get to work is read news/blogs anyway.)

I’m generally paranoid about sharing this much information with the oh-so-scary internet, but RescueTime seems pretty secure. I don’t feel as if I’m risking my privacy in anyway (aside from all these graphs I’m voluntarily posting on my blog :P ) using this tool. You can embed graphs from your page and put them on your blog, though I haven’t figure out how to do it for a WordPress post yet since WordPress strips Javascript from posts. I haven’t done this myself yet, but Kelvin says that if you look at an internal webpage, it’ll show up as “Intranet” in the data. Supposedly, they take no other information, and very little is shared (nothing specific to a user).

Based on my first day using this tool, I think RescueTime is a truly awesome tool for the slacker cube peon. Being able to see how much you slack off in graph form mentally knocks some sense into you. It’s nice to have internet usage tracking minus the pissed-off boss. (I’m sure our company has some sort of internet tracking, but I guess I haven’t set off any alarms.) Even though there’s no way I’m going to share my graphs with my managers (hey coworker buddies, DON’T SHARE THIS WITH MY BOSSES), knowing I’m constantly being logged makes me want to work more. Or at least have my work windows active, which is much more conducive to productivity than watching music videos on Youtube. Of course, this is all under the assumption that you actually give a damn that you don’t do jack.

New thing I learned today: Bret McKenzie, half of the New Zealand musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, was in the first and third Lord of the Rings movies as Figwit. The other half, Jemaine Clement, starred in indie flick Eagle vs Shark.

Apparently, when Americans think of New Zealand, they either think of Lord of the Rings or Flight of the Conchords. The only song I’ve ever heard by Flight of the Conchords was the very funny “It’s Business Time“, so I got bored and checked out more videos (part of the reason my Youtube time is high today). They’re apparently always hilarious, so I stopped watching after a few videos; I’m convinced to get the DVDs.

Is it bad that I think their dancing is totally hot?

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