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Heh-- people have called RescueTime evil, especially in a work setting. Never hurt our feelings much-- we try to not go tooo far down the evil path, but we've

Heh-- people have called RescueTime evil, especially in a work setting. Never hurt our feelings much-- we try to not go tooo far down the evil path, but we've always felt like a manager/biz owner has the right to say, "How are you spending your time?" and get an honest (and CORRECT) answer. A lot of people say, "Well, if I get my work done in 2 hours every day, I have a RIGHT to screw off for the other 6"... While we think that folks deserve some "down-time", I think there's such a thing as under-tasked and under-utilized team members who just need to have more work thrown their way. For a knowledge worker, it's trivially easy to hide when you don't have much work to do.

shiranaihito 18y ago
> we try to not go tooo far down the evil path So what have you done on the evil path so far?
- webwright 18y ago
  Well, we've created a tool that a manager could put on an employees machine to see how they spend their time at work. We strongly market/urge managers to expose this data to their employees and allow them to see how they compare to the average on their team, but they don't HAVE to do that. The "spectrums" of evil that we deal with are: Open vs. stealth: Right now RescueTime can't be stealthy, but there are certainly settings (academic labs trying to understand utilization) where stealth might be appropriate. and Exposure of worker data to managers (customers): How much detail do we expose to the manager beyond the team averages/totals? Due to customer demand, we've exposed some high level individual data to managers. and How much data we collect in a workplace. We're not budging here and are sticking with time/attention data. There are services out there that literally log keystrokes, take screenshots, and blindly cc managers on all emails sent (including personal webmail). Yuck.
  - shiranaihito 18y ago
    With an app whose main feature is to track people in one way, it's not surprising that it would end up tracking people in other ways too. In any case, please try to turn back and head back up the evil path, or at the very least, stop where you are :)

shiranaihito 18y ago

> we try to not go tooo far down the evil path So what have you done on the evil path so far?

webwright 18y ago
Well, we've created a tool that a manager could put on an employees machine to see how they spend their time at work. We strongly market/urge managers to expose this data to their employees and allow them to see how they compare to the average on their team, but they don't HAVE to do that. The "spectrums" of evil that we deal with are: Open vs. stealth: Right now RescueTime can't be stealthy, but there are certainly settings (academic labs trying to understand utilization) where stealth might be appropriate. and Exposure of worker data to managers (customers): How much detail do we expose to the manager beyond the team averages/totals? Due to customer demand, we've exposed some high level individual data to managers. and How much data we collect in a workplace. We're not budging here and are sticking with time/attention data. There are services out there that literally log keystrokes, take screenshots, and blindly cc managers on all emails sent (including personal webmail). Yuck.
- shiranaihito 18y ago
  With an app whose main feature is to track people in one way, it's not surprising that it would end up tracking people in other ways too. In any case, please try to turn back and head back up the evil path, or at the very least, stop where you are :)