It’s easy to get sidetracked from work. Read your emails here, surf a little there, and before you know it, a few hours have gone by. Then you scratch your head asking, “Where did all that time go?”

I used to have a crude system wherein I’d manually input whatever I did in 30 minutes intervals on a spreadsheet, to study how I spend my time on a day-to-day basis. Obviously, this has some drawbacks, like being cumbersome and the fact that I’m rather forgetful. Fortunately, I found an online time-tracker that can do this automatically for me, and its called RescueTime.

When you sign up for an account, you’ll be asked to download and install their Data Collector. This will track how much time you’re spending on whatever desktop application or specific website you’re actively using/browsing, and sends the data periodically to the RescueTime servers so you can view them online on your Dashboard. Here’s how it looks like:

Many of the popular sites will have their own pre-selected category, like News/Blogs (e.g. The New York Times), Design/Presentation (e.g. Google Docs), and Fun (e.g. YouTube). These categories are based on user suggestions. You may also suggest your own for sites that haven’t been given grouped into their own category. Categories are useful in giving you a bird’s eye view of your computer-related activities. If want to label websites or applications your own way, you can do so by associating them with tags. There can be multiple tags for each site or application. This is perfect if you want to study certain behaviors, and you can be as specific or macroscopic as you like.

Another great thing about RescueTime is that it gives you the ability to set goals, and lets you send real-time alerts as soon as you reach or exceed these goal. The alerts can come via email, RSS, or SMS, depending on your convenience. Also, there’s a group version for corporate use, but for this review I used the personal version.

Of course, there are still some things I think RescueTime can improve on. For example, I’d like to see more customization option for the graphs, such as the ability to select two time periods for side-by-side comparison, similar to Google Analytics. It would also be great if the Dashboard could be viewable both offline and online, and if there could be more options in sending the email summary of user activities, rather than having it fixed to a weekly basis. I’ve read in their corporate blog that off-PC work measurement (meetings, etc) is also in the works, so that’s something I’m looking forward to. This tool is definitely recommended.