I’ve been using RescueTime for a while now, and while it hasn’t really improved my productivity, that’s mostly because I’m actually really productive already. And I can prove it thanks to RescueTime.

RescueTime is an software application you install on your computer that tracks the active application and logs that information so you can view it in their web app. You then rate the applications on how productive you are when using them. For example, when I’m using my IDE, I’m clearly being productive. Same when I’m using putty. Not so much when I’m using iTunes.

RescueTime gives you nice little graphs (one of which you can see above) on a daily and weekly basis, and you can also view your productivity by category. They also let you compare to the average of everyone who uses RescueTime and give you a rank based on your percentile.

When I first installed it, I was kind of obsessed with checking and categorizing and scoring everything and trying to get my productivity score as high as possible. When I get busy, I can drop to just checking weekly when it sends me a report via email, and I don’t even really notice it running in the background. When I’m not as overwhelmed, it’s a fun little game to play, and a small little reminder in the system tray to check what application you’re using and how that’s going to affect your productivity score. It’s also a good way to effortlessly track and log your productivity/application usage, which is especially good for people like me who love tracking productivity/output but either spend too much time time tracking stuff in spreadsheets, or go to the other extreme and just give up on tracking completely.