A review of RescueTime: Part 1. Why time tracking?

Just about a year ago I stumbled upon RescueTime, a time tracking tool for individuals and teams. This is the first part of a two-part review I intend to write on the individual version of the application. I will also discuss the topics of economics of human time and collecting time data to a real-time data warehouse.

This part of the review will focus on economics of time tracking. Tracking life events divides people and even the most accounting-oriented persons have mixed feelings about tracking their time. Knowing your time, expenses, calories etc is both potentially insightful and yet utterly disturbing. Most of us can probably remember periods of our lives when we had to count money more carefully, and the idea of going back to penny-pinching days is indeed disturbing. Likewise, tracking time can be seen as petty waste of time. Something that busy people do only to get money from. So why bother for nothing?

There are a few reasons that make time tracking sensible.

First, time is always a scarce resource. There is a fundamental difference between counting cents and counting seconds: money has no hard upper limit for an individual, but life definitely has. It follows, that if you compare the utility of an extra unit of free time versus an extra unit of money, the marginal utility of money tends to decrease more than the marginal utility of time. There are two factors that amplify this:

• employment increases money and decreases unallocated time
  
• getting older decreases one's available time by definition, but it also increases one's wealth from two sources: inheritance from the deceased and interest payments from accrued wealth.

These facts can be summarized as follows:

The more money you have the less wealthy you are in time, relatively.

Second reason to track your time is that you can actually waste time voluntarily. There are places in society that restrict individual's use of time. Like the army for example. I've been in the draft army and I know that tracking every minute of time does not make any sense there. You are stuck in the woods and that's about it. You are not wasting time because you don't have any choice. Wasting time is a concept that presumes individual liberty.

Third, you have to have plans. Without plans there is no difference between time well spent and waisted. Everyone has plans but there are huge differences in commitment. Time tracking is a clear statement that one is committed to his/her plans. At least in the most measurable level.

So far, I have tried to describe an image of the people who should be interested in time tracking. They are relatively well-off, determined people who have long-term plans. Now that is a good clientele. These people are perhaps busy with their current commitments and distractions surrounding them, but they do want to make progress. Time tracking tool has to offer them something they couldn't do themselves, a value proposition. Doing tracking yourself generally means doing tracking with Microsoft Excel, the world's tool of choice for semistructured data management. So any new tool has to beat Excel, but that is only a start.

So what is RescueTime good for?

Even if time tracking creates value, it may not create net value. The costs of tracking might be too high. The first and foremost cost in time tracking is the input time cost. This is where RescueTime has made a big effort. They have really focused on keeping the input costs low. It is not even possible to input timesheets manually to RescueTime, at least not from the UI. This prevents certain scenarios like project billing but I think that the decision is right. First, you have to get reliable, objective data on your time use and only then you can make judgements on more subjective items like projects. After all, project billing is not about counting time, it is all about putting a price to a work agreement.

In part 2, I'll discuss more about RescueTime, its data collector, reporting UI, and the whole data-warehouse centric application model in general. This will rely heavily on my current academic focus, the trickle-loaded real-time data warehouse. Stay tuned!

-mika-