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Content Tagged with rescuetime + YCombinator
8aweek To Help You Kick That Internet Time Wasting Addiction
New Y Combinator startup 8aweek aims to help you stop wasting all that time on random Internet sites. They offer a Firefox plugin that monitors the web sites you visit and how long you spend on each site. If you are on a user-defined “restricted site,” the plugin will tell you when you’ve spent too much time there. Or alternatively, it will block sites if you tell it to be a little more aggressive about time management.
Some users may not be all that Interested in having the plugin try to change their surfing habits. But the service also provides an interesting chart showing all the sites you visited the previous 24 hours and how much total time was spent there. Some users may be surprised to see, for example, just how much of their life is spent on Facebook. The product includes a privacy option that allows users to turn off monitoring, or have the data stored only on their PC, not the Internet.
The company is offering the plugin for free; they want to make money by selling the service to businesses who want to limit the amount of time their employees waste on the Internet. Today businesses can buy a web filter to block access to known time wasting sites. But filters don’t catch everything, and some companies may want to take a softer stance by simply monitoring time on these sites rather than blocking them outright.
8aweek is very similar to RescueTime, another Y Combinator startup that launched last November. RescueTime montiors usage of both websites as well as desktop applications, so the products are not identical. But the products seem too close for comfort - I’m surprised Y Combinator is backing both of them.
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RescueTime Out Of Private Beta, Tracking How (Un)Productive You Are
Tony Wright has been up to a new project since selling two-month-old Jobby to Jobster last May. It’s called RescueTime and it’s meant to help manage your time and stop you from ending up like this guy. We looked at the product previously, but they’ve now come out of private beta. Wright and his team have also taken funding from Y Combinator, and stand in stark contrast to the usual twenty-something ramen-eating stereotype of YC founders.
Wright and his team wanted to make their time management tool as seamless as possible. So unlike other more manual tools or logs, ResucueTime is a desktop/web-based productivity tool that automatically tracks how long and where you spend time on your computer, be it Mac or PC. All the data the program collects is sent to your online account every half hour where it can be analyzed or shared with team members through their analytics package. Their souped up stopwatch tracks what program you have in focus and for how long. It also allows for advanced features, like program tagging and grouping, and can easily be turned on and off.
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.
Although my own particular experience of using the application wasn’t all too enlightening, project teams could find it as a useful way of collectively managing time as the product gets more nuanced in the data they collect. After a day of trying it out, I found (surprise) I spent of a lot of time on Firefox surfing TechCrunch and Techmeme, while sifting through email.
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