I like the product and I know they're a YC company, but that was as close to a flat-out sales pitch as I've seen posted here in a awhile. Not the end of the world, but what was that REALLY saying other than RescueTime has a good ROI if you pay for it? And "recession-proof"? Come on now...

Yeah I'll cop to that - it is a bit sales-pitchy. We were just really surprised by those figures, though, and I wanted to share them in a useful way. Can you blame me? :)

I have no problem with the post itself; it's in your blog and it's totally relevant to your company. I just don't think it added much value in this forum without giving it context.

If the subject was "How to use real-world data to sell your startup's products", the context would be totally appropriate because readers would have a differnet mindset going in. Spin, baby, spin ;-)

Would have been much more interesting if they had any tips other than "use our product".

I sense an underlying assumption that time == productivity. This is probably the case for some jobs, but definitely not all of them.

It strikes me as something that would be far more accurate in a job where a predetermined set of steps are repeatedly performed, and the time taken for each is known before hand.

For jobs where cognitive effort is the fuel behind productivity, measuring such effort by time spent in a particular application or lines of code written over a fixed period of time strike me as at best a middling approximation to what is produced. The lines of code ,or the end artwork, or whatever creative output you see may be the result of an rather involved and complicated thought process. Sometimes I can spend hours banging my head against a problem, and make very little progress on it. Sometimes a solution will come to me after I focus on something else for a while and let my subconscious chew on the problem. Sometimes solutions to a problem involve doing things that look to most people like anything but productive work.

Honestly, I think you can gauge far more about your employees' productivity by talking to them about what they are working on than you will by looking at aggregates of a limited number of data points, and trying to get a numerical representation of productivity based on that. You're likely to get a more accurate and well-rounded idea of the employee's actual productivity, while at the same time improving their morale, motivation and lessening to the feeling that they are just another cog.

This is not to say RescueTime doesn't have value to the worker or the employer. I think the value is far greater for the employer who trusts the employee to manage their own productivity, perhaps recommending RescueTime to help that along, than it is for an employer who imposes such a tool on their employee as a mandatory productivity metric.

RescueTime totally agrees. I have a draft post on the relationship between time and productivity... I personally believe that time spent correlates with productivity, but correlates more strongly with engagement, motivation, distraction, organization, etc.

If you want to measure productivity, a think a more holistic approach is in order. Time spent, lines of code, minutes in productive apps, all help zero in on it.

Well, I think it can be argued that it's at least a leading indicator.

Does no one else find the idea of a company using this to monitor their employees off-putting at best, and sinister at worst?