After spending several hours in front of the computer screen, I often walk away with little to show for my efforts. A lousy paragraph here, a half-formed email there. Where does the time go? Thanks to RescueTime, I now know how every minute is spent, down to the last excruciating detail.

It’s simple: install the widget and RescueTime generates dozens of fancy charts about the programs you use, the ways in which you procrastinate, and how productive you really are. Assign a few tags and soon you’ve got a comprehensive portrait of what you’re actually doing all day behind that screen.

Turns out I spend a shocking amount of time mucking around with Twitter rather than working in Word and InDesign. I don’t even want to show you that chart. The upshot is that you can create goals, e.g. ‘write for four hours per day’ and RescueTime will let you know if you reach it (or not).

If you’re on a roll and you outpace the productivity of the ‘Average User’, you get a little medal for it. I cannot emphasize how rewarding this is; from what I can tell so far, Average User is a very busy and efficient individual.

Given the relentless datastream we fight against everyday, a time-tracking device like RescueTime seems indispensable. It keeps me honest: I like to believe that I spend my days writing, researching, and pushing pixels, but then I’m confronted with the cold hard proof of a chart telling me that I spent two and half hours last night trolling through music blogs. Or 45 minutes last week just spacing out in front of my Google homepage. And nearly two hours fooling around with RescueTime . . .

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Cajmere – It’s Time for the Percolator
from Percolator. Cajual, 1992
That’s what time is it. Seventeen years ago, Curtis Alan Jones aka Green Velvet dropped this record on an unsuspecting and confused public. Alongside Jaydee’s ‘Plastic Dreams’, ‘Percolator’ was one of the few electronic tracks to chart on prime time Detroit radio (WJLB’s top eight at eight). It annoyed the hell out of me then and still drives me nuts today. But it’s a brilliant record.