Web Worker Daily

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Tony Wright, founder and CEO of RescueTime, a venture-backed software startup that helps businesses and individuals improve their time management through automated time tracking and reporting.

A few weeks ago I read this very interesting piece on WebWorkerDaily about the impact of corporate blocking policies on web working employees. The gist of the article was that blocking tends to throw away a lot of the good with the bad and, increasingly, the things that managers think of as “bad” (Twitter, Facebook, IM, etc.) are actually an important part of folks’ communication toolbox.

I’d like to pile on with more evidence that wholesale blocking is bad. The University of Melbourne found that workers who are allowed to surf the web for fun at work were actually nine percent more productive than those who weren’t. So what about monitoring? Well, it turns out that monitoring your employees (the way most employers do it) is similarly detrimental to productivity. It also tends to make life more stressful for employees.

At RescueTime, we are constantly thinking about the ethics and efficacy of blocking and monitoring for teams and individuals — it’s our mission to actually build software that does this in a way that increases productivity and isn’t evil. A huge, and sometimes daunting, part of our job as product developers is to educate employers on what works, what’s ethical and what kind of expectations are reasonable for web workers. Here’s some of what we’ve learned. Read the rest of this entry »

RescueTime, the ridiculously easy time management and analysis application, recently added some great features to its already impressive Web-based service to make it just that much more useful and indispensable in my work routine. The addition of autotagging, group tracking, and improved privacy are the highlights in their most recent release.

We’ve covered RescueTime briefly in the past but for the uninitiated, unlike a typical time-sheet application RescueTime requires no data entry. A small desktop application runs in the background and sends updates to your online profile. By tracking which application you have “in focus,” it knows what you are working on. Using the web application, you then tag and categorize these entries to see how you are spending your time.

Read the rest of this entry »