RescueTime

Following the recommendations and positive reviews from Lifehacker and others, I just set up my free RescueTime Lite account and so far I am lovin' it!

I had been looking for a "time tracker" app to record my overall time budgeting and make sure that the actual hours & minutes of my days were being spent on my actual big hairy P1's.

RescueTime gives you a fantastically useful overview of where all those minutes are going, broken down by day, category, application, and website or activity.

Getting set up is a no brainer - it took me less than two minutes to create a user account and download the tracker app to my MacBook Pro.

Once the app was installed, within a few hours my metrics started appearing at my "Dashboard" user page at RescueTime's website. The various charts and displays look great and are super intuitive to follow. This is exactly what I had hoped for - and all for free!

Honestly, the free version of the app is so good that I will probably pony up for the "Pro" version if only to reward the developers for building such a beautiful product. The "Pro" version apparently does give you some pretty juicy bells and whistles, such as: more granular tracking of time spent working on individual documents (as opposed to just apps and sites), setting of alerts for goals, and unlimited data storage (the free version tops out at two months' worth of data).

At any rate, I can already see this tool is going to be an incredibly useful nugget in my ongoing quest to turbocharge my own personal productivity. Thanks guys for a fantastic product. Highly recommended.

EDIT: I just got my first "Distraction Alert" - time to get back to work!