Category Archives: Technology

RescueTime: Easy Time Management

Technology, ,

Because I work from home and am paid by the hour, I needed something to help me keep track of the time I spent working on projects. I’d been using Xnote Stopwatch successfully for some time, but often forgot to start it when I began working or stop it, when I moved on to non-project related tasks. I was forced to guess how much time I’d put into projects at the end of the day.

I then heard about a time management software program called RescueTime which was then in private beta and signed on to be a beta tester. After a few days or maybe weeks I was invited to help test RescueTime and found it to be exactly what I was looking for.

You sign up for an account and download a small application from the website. The application sits in your system tray and collects data on which application or website you are actively using and it periodically sends that information to your RescueTime dashboard. On the dashboard you can “tag” the applications and sites you visit with terms like “work”, “fun”, “volunteer”, etc. RescueTime then presents you with a graph that shows you how much time you spent on each category.

You can also set goals and keep track of your goals on your dashboard as well as view your productivity after rating your tags for productiveness.

The folks behind RescueTime are continuously working to make it better and are responsive to user feedback in an almost uncanily rapid time frame. Once I sent feedback through their little user feedback box and within a few moments received an email response from them.

I like it when software works the way it says it will.

Twitter — What am I doing?

Technology

I’m still not convinced Twitter is right for me. If you’ve never used it, this is how it works:

You sign up and then send updates to the world of what you are doing. The updates must be short – 140 characters or less (that includes spaces, I think).  Not much happens until you start following people though. Then you get their updates. You can reply to them by typing @ before their username. Sometimes they reply, but sometimes they don’t. It’s like a dysfunctional chatroom.

I only “follow” 12 people. I can’t imagine what it would be like if I followed hundreds – I’m already distracted when one of the 12 I follow updates what they are doing.

We’ll see.

Millicent — Practically Perfect

Humor, Musings, Technology, Things

I’d been wanting a GPS device for a year or so when my husband gave me one for my birthday. It was a Garmin StreetPilot i5. Everyone agreed this was a perfect gift for me because of my knack for getting lost.

We tried it out immediately. We discovered that we didn’t like the American female voice – it was flat and nasally obnoxious, so we switched to the British female voice and declared her official Voice of the Camry. She was authoritative in a humble way. We named her Millicent.

Millicent was our heroine. She got us home when we were lost and got us to far away destinations when we were unsure of how to get there. We envisioned a woman sitting in our personal satellite watching over us and keeping us safe.

Occasionally Millicent would become annoyed at us — mostly when we failed to follow her directions. In those cases, she would [seem to] take a deep breath and say “Re-callllll-cu-lating” in a reproachful tone. When we continued to disregard her directions we fully expected her to say something like, “And just why did you bring me along if you are not going to listen to my advice?”

Last August, close to our first anniversary with Millicent, she — along with her power cord and dashboard mount, went missing from our car. We suspected foul play and were worried that her thieves would treat her poorly. We envisioned her, blindfolded and gagged in the trunk of their car, along with other stolen items. We knew that if allowed to talk she would say “Re-callllll-cu-lating” at some point, and that might be her undoing. Thieves don’t like to be talked back to.

Of course, it is possible that Millicent simply decided that our family no longer needed her — especially since her advice was often shunned. She may simply have used her dashboard mount in an umbrella like fashion and floated away like a miniature electronic Mary Poppins.

Up next: Our new GPS device: Bruce — aka Steve — aka Ken.