Tracking Your Time with RescueTime

Attention data junkies: you use Quicken to see where your dollars and cents go, Google Analytics to see who visits your blog, and got the upgraded package in your car just to get the trip computer. Now, you can track how you spend your time on your computer and the internet with RescueTime.com. It keeps track of how much time you spend in various desktop apps, but it also tracks time on websites. You can see how much time you spend in GMail ("personal" time) vs. Google AdWords ("work" time).

I've been using it for a couple of weeks and it's been fun to see where my time goes. I was surprised that I don't actually spend much time during the day goofing off or reading industry news. Most of my time is spent in Outlook reading and sending email, with a lot of time spent in Excel as well.

The key to making RescueTime useful is the ability to tag sites so that you can see how your time is spent. Outlook might be tagged with "work" and "email" while GMail might be "personal" and "email". Add up all the different tasks marked as "work" and you can start to see how you spend your day.


The product is new and is being enhanced rapidly. Nevertheless, it's easy to think of features I wish it had: auto tagging of various websites using regular expression,, track computer idle time/screensaver time as a separate entry in the logs, be able to enable/disable automatically during various times so you can only track work hours, for example.

As for me, of the 5 hours I've spent in the office today, I've spent 40 minutes in Outlook, 35 minutes on Google, and 35 minutes working on AdWords campaigns in AdWords Editor. The hourly graph has a big dip where I went for a workout (and the computer was idle). Nice.



www.RescueTime.com

Running Route

Been playing with Google Maps, and created a route of the run I've been doing the last week or so. I want to run the 5 mile Gallop and Gorge race Thanksgiving morning, and needed to go on a couple of training runs. It's a good 3.8 mile loop, pretty well lit, with sidewalks on the entire path. That's useful since much of it is through downtown Carrboro, and I've been running at night.



View Larger Map
For those not running (that would be the other person reading this blog), I hope you have a happy and safe Thanksgiving.

Much Ado About Click Fraud?

I just uploaded a post to ChannelAdvisor's blog about click fraud in paid search marketing; what it is, where it comes from, and what to do about it. Here's an excerpt but check out the full post for all the details.

Fraudulent clicks can kill a search engine marketing program. Costs can skyrocket, and for the on-line retailer, revenue goes nowhere. Most of my clients worry about it, and it's tough to impossible to get a complete understanding of the size or scope of the actual problem.