The eOK .network

What have you been doing with your time last week? Well, here (above) is what I’ve been doing with mine.

In a quick summary, most of my time was spent in the office and I’ve actually done more writing and email than listening to music! Well, that’s not entirely accurate of my life, but it’s a sure indicator based on the applications I’ve been running. The service is called RescueTime; I found out about it via LifeHacker, and this my review of it.

This was a regular work week for me, so as expected I spent most of my time in the office on “productivity” apps. To my amazement (or embarrassment) I’ve been found to use MSN Messenger more than Outlook. (Justification: I do have colleagues and clients on my buddy list).

RescueTime is available as a download on both the PC and Mac which works great for me because I use a PC in the office and a Mac at home. I have RescueTime installed on both machines feeding data to the same online account giving me the chance to measure my activities in the office against what I do at home. For example, working on MS Word is done in the office but Pages is used when I’m home (or wherever I sit down with my MacBook Pro).

The service also measures how long you’ve been spending on web pages and in my overworked life I’ve spent most of my time on Factiva doing media research for clients. I do however spend a good amount of time on Gmail as well.

Think of this as intelligence for personal productivity and I’m starting to appreciate the insights its giving me. But it isn’t perfect.

There aren’t many options with this service and you can’t break down say access to sites from Firefox vs Safari which I think would help my office vs home situation and you can’t filter out sites you don’t want documented, so don’t share your data if you’ve been spending lots of time on… ahem… you know… type of sites.

Although you can drill down into the specific days to see when you’ve been working and when you’ve been playing, it doesn’t let you see a view wider than a week making it hard to measure improvement and changes in your computing habits.

But overall it’s a really nice service to have and just as web analytics have grown to become more sophisticated I’m looking forward to better personal measureability in the future.