Episode: 97
Title: HPR0097: An Interview with Tony Wright
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0097/hpr0097.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 11:29:04

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MUSIC
Good evening, I'm Trek Nubis, and I had the opportunity to interview the founder of my
new favorite productivity tool, Rescue Time, so I'll go ahead and let the interview speak
for itself.
I'm Tony Wright, I'm the founder of RescueTime.com, which is, well, you're probably going
to ask me what Rescue Time does in the next question, but Rescue Time is a software that
gives individuals and businesses a kind of unique and fresh understanding of how they
spend their time and provides tools to help them spend it more productively.
So who's this product aimed at, is it mostly businesses or individuals or what's going
on?
Well, so we started with the idea that we wanted to target kind of individuals, and it
was attacking kind of a personal problem of our own that, you know, that we had, we
were doing the Scrum methodology when we were doing some software development at a company
called Jobster, and every day people's job was to sort of articulate what they did in
the previous 24 hours and what they were going to get done in the next 24, and we found
that people's ability to sort of talk about what they did in the last 24 hours was awful.
They'd say, well, I thought I was going to get done, you know, these three things, but,
you know, it turns out that I only got this thing done, but I felt really busy, and I
don't know why.
So the idea, and I kind of had this suspicion that I was, you know, while I thought I
was a web developer for a living, in fact, I was increasingly turning into an emailer
and instant messenger for a living, and that that's where most of my time was.
So we wanted to kind of build this, and the idea was, you know, initially it was just
kind of for us, and as a side project, but as we talked to it to friends and other developers
more and more, we realized that there were some other people who had some interest.
So it kind of very slowly sort of morphed its way into that.
So we're, to start with, we're targeting individuals, I think as we, you know, as the
product matures a little bit and gets, gets more stable and gets more powerful, I think
there is a lot of potential with kind of small teams kind of to attack this in a collaborative
way to understand how they are collectively spending their time, because I mean, obviously
everyone's pretty buried in with the information overload issues, and we think that it would
be better if people spent less time at their, in front of their computers and, and spend
it kind of more efficiently so that they could, you know, have a life outside of their
computers.
Okay, so you're targeting individuals, you know, how can you help me give me like a
use case scenario?
Well, I mean, so that there's a couple of different use cases that the, you know, the big
one right now, because rescue time effectively is, is capturing what you're paying attention
to on the computer, it's ideally suited for people who spend most of their professional
life in front of their computer, right?
It's less good for people, you know, like a sales guy who's on the road or something like
that. So, so the idea is that, that you, you know, and what we see a lot of is people
are curious about how they spend their time. They realize that something is wrong, they
realize they're not productive as productive as they want to be, and their job is to create
some sort of output, right? Whether they're a, a coder or a designer or a writer, you
know, they have a vested interest in their own efficiency. So, and if you look at, you
know, at any sort of time management system, you know, when you, when you read these kind
of business-y self-help books, they say, well, the first thing you should do is keep a log
of how you spend your time. And it turns out that's pretty darn impractical. I mean, if you,
you imagine writing all this stuff down on a piece of paper, every time you alt tab to an
instant message window, you'd have a pretty busy piece of paper pretty quickly.
I actually tried doing that once, but I found that I jumped around too much and it was like
too much to write down. It wasn't like working out that well.
Yeah. I mean, what we're finding is people are alt tabbing. I mean, this is my favorite
stat that I pull out at rescue time, is that the average rescue time user is alt tabbing to an
instant message window, 77 times per day. And that's the average, right? So, and I, when I looked
at my own, I was about 133. And that caused me to be so horrified that I literally uninstalled
instant message apps for my computer, just because, I mean, I mean, the idea that we can multitask
human beings, I mean, if you poke around about it and research a little bit, it's just not true.
We aren't good at it. And those that cut tasks, switching and context switching is both painful
and expensive from a productivity point of view. So, the idea is that as an individual,
you know, and we see this a lot of with kind of freelance consultants too, who's financial
well-being depends on their own efficiency. That their goal is to sort of start to measure and
start to repair their kind of own productivity and get more productive. And there's certainly a,
you know, just a pure curiosity motivation as well as just, you know, people want to know the
answer to this question. And the answer is generally pretty darn entertaining if nothing else.
Okay. So, how does this work? Why don't you go ahead and just kind of like explain the process?
Sure. So, rescue time is a small downloadable application, a couple hundred K, and it's available
for Mac and Windows. And we've actually had someone in the Linux community dive in and make a Linux
client as well. But it's a small downloadable application that you will install on your computer.
And what it does is it pays attention to what you're focusing on. So, it's not measuring what
applications or websites are open, but it's measuring what's in focus. It's going to give you more
detail than say Firefox. It's not going to say, well, you spent four hours in Firefox.
It's going to actually dive into that and say you spent, you know, 20 minutes at Google and
30 minutes on Gmail and, you know, an hour and a half on Facebook or wherever you spend your time.
So, the idea is really to capture what your attention, you know, where your attention is going.
And it also, of course, idles out. So, if your computer, if your keyboard and mouse are idle for a
certain amount of time, it'll decide that you are no longer in front of your computer and kind of
close out the current record. Some of this is a little scary, though. It's kind of interesting to
see how much time I actually spend on just Google alone. Yeah. There's a blog post that we actually
have on our company blog where I actually, within rescue time, so all of this data gets sent to
our servers where we kind of, you know, crunch the numbers, then allow you to do analytics on it
to see basically a bunch of bar graphs and a bunch of lists. And you can categorize anything,
you know, website or application, any way you want via tags, kind of like delicious. So, if,
you know, for example, I have decided to tag just because I wanted to know how much Google owned
me. I decided to tag every Google product that I used, you know, whether it's Google desktop
search or Google search or Gmail or Google Analytics. I tagged all those things as Google so that I can
very easily have a day-by-day week-by-week or month-by-month sense of what percentage of my time was
spent on some sort of Google product. And when I first did that, it started as 13% on average. And
since it grown, about 19% as our company started using Google Docs and Google spreadsheets instead of
Microsoft Word and Excel. So, Google is a pretty dominant, but we did find that the still the most
dominant application on the planet is Outlook in terms of time spent.
Thoughtful question, this is such a fantastic service. How much does it actually cost?
Yeah, my home run answer is, yeah, it's right now it's free. So, we're individually
used, it's free. The idea is eventually as we kind of roll out some, and that'll be, you know,
if we ever say, and I can obviously never say what's going to, what things are going to be the
like in years, but we want there to always be a free offering. And we want it to be at least as
good as what we have now. So, we are going to make, turn this into crippleware and make it so no one
can use it unless they're forking up money. Where we kind of see it going is, you know, charging
teams and businesses to kind of see this data in aggregate and to use it kind of collectively
and collaboratively. And that's where we see, you know, eventually there being kind of a revenue
model. I'm not a big fan of advertisement, just because I don't know, it seems to me that when
you put advertisements in a tool, which rescue time is, you know, first and foremost, a tool for
people that those ads blend and tend to go away kind of visually pretty quickly, you know, if you
aren't, I don't know if you use Gmail or any webmail client, but when I use any webmail client,
you know, the ad region disappears for me, right? And you just spend so much time on it that it goes
away. So, and that we could obviously, because of the data that we have, give people some pretty
amazingly targeted ads, right? We can know, you know, exactly what you're doing. So if you're,
you know, Photoshop guy, we can give you great ads for cool Photoshop stuff, but I just don't
want to be in the ad business. I, you know, we're sort of more interested in solving people's problems
and, and, you know, being helpful for people rather than, you know, trying to trick them into
clicking on things, which is what the ad business kind of seems to be. You do have a lot of data,
a lot of really cool data. Like, I imagine that you could approach Adobe and say, Hey, you know,
we know everything about how people actually use your CS3, you know, master suite. Do you have any
plans to maybe sell anonymous data or anything like that? Yeah, I mean, there's the data asset is kind
of, I mean, that's a long term thing where I think if we had a big enough user base, you know,
I could imagine that that data asset would get pretty interesting. Right now our user base is,
is kind of small. We're in the neighborhood of about 33,000 users as of today. And that's growing,
you know, at 9% per week now. So that's got to annualize. That'd be about three or four thousand
percent growth. But, you know, I think eventually the idea of a data asset play is kind of interesting.
We could do something like Alexa does, which is basically kind of published for free, you know,
the, you know, kind of a zeitgeist of what people are doing with their time and sort of how that's
trending. But yeah, you know, this, obviously there's, you know, some privacy implications here.
So not only anonymized, but it would have to be only an aggregate, right? We would never say,
you know, here's anonymous, you know, user B, you know, and here's how they spend their time,
because I think you can kind of sometimes reverse engineer data like this and get back to some sort
of identity. So we really want to avoid that. Well, that sort of happened to Netflix and A,
well, they released a whole bunch of, you know, quote-unquote anonymous data. And it was proven
that some of that data can be actually, you know, tracked back to the original user.
That's nice of them to make those mistakes before we got here. So, so we get a word of, but yeah,
I mean, that's kind of a no-brainer. And we do, I mean, a big part of rescue times, you know,
feature set is pretty privacy focused. One of my favorite ones is we offer, you know,
obviously you don't want to track every single website that you go to. You might have 10 or 12,
you know, websites and applications that you use frequently. So we have a feature that's called
white lists that allows you to basically keep a list of the sites that you care about, you know,
on your computer. And rescue time will basically take that and only send information about those
websites up to our servers. Everything else will still get sent, but it will get sent in a sort of
other website bucket. So it'll it'll literally never get any other data than the websites that,
you know, that you want to send. And the rescue time data also is sent, it's basically pushed as
YAML files. I don't this is probably getting relatively geeky, but, but they're basically there,
you can see the data that rescue time sends. We do send it securely, but you can see basically
exactly, you know, on your hard drive what data we're sending. So the goal is as much as possible,
put the data into the user's hands, give them control of what they want to send and what they don't.
And once it gets here, you know, we give them control also the ability to delete, you know,
data and a selective day-by-day basis or just, you know, they want to wipe a website, you know,
if they went to monster.com and they realize, gosh, you know, I don't necessarily want my boss to
know that I'm going to monster.com. I'd like to delete that data. They can do so and, you know,
basically, you know, that's all under their control. So you have all this data, all these
bar graphs and whatnot. What can you do with this data? Can you make it do anything for you,
can you, you know, publish it in any way, anything like that? Right. Yeah. So, I mean, the first kind
of step of rescue time was to be kind of an analytics package. And we think that just the knowledge
of, you know, the ability to see this and crunch around on this data is powerfully motivating and
is pretty behavior-changing is what we've seen. We do want to kind of, and we started doing this
a little bit, but we do want to move in the direction of kind of giving people tools to help,
you know, help themselves along a little bit. So we have a goals and alerts feature.
And a TV example, you know, one of my goals is I want to spend less than 30 minutes a day on
news and blog sites. So, and I have it set up so that as soon as I exceed 30 minutes a day,
I get an SMS message, my phone buzzes with essentially a reminder that, hey, I just blew my
goal for the day and I need to get back to work. And there's also positive goals too where you can
say, I want to spend, you know, generally I try to aim for, you know, six hours of stuff that I
label as work per day, which, you know, you'd think that's not a particularly ambitious goal, but
that tends to be in the sort of 97th, 98th percentile of actual work time that people spend on a
given day. So, yeah, so I positive goals as well. And you can imagine that within a group or a
business setting, you could set it up so that, you know, if your average team member spend say 30
minutes doing social networking stuff a day, that you could set it up to send a kind of an automated
nudge to any employee that exceeds 30 minutes and say, you know, nothing that's blocking websites
or getting kind of, you know, Soviet on it. But, but, you know, something that says, hey, you know what,
just want to let you know you're now officially below average on the team in terms of wasting time
on social network. So, maybe, maybe kind of think about giving back to work. So we don't want to be
like this micro management tool. And that's why we put in a lot of the control into the user's hands.
You can't install rescue time in a stealth way so you can never put it on a computer without
someone knowing about it. It pops up every time you reboot and there's a big icon in the system tray
and like that. So, yeah, so the goal is just to kind of, you know, try to give managers some tools
that, you know, kind of allow them to not be micromanagers, but still have their teams kind of,
you know, going in the right direction and also give them a little bit of business intelligence
to understand, hey, you know, is my team, you know, when you have a small team, you can understand
sort of productivity and you can, on a good gut feeling, you can kind of say, yeah, the team kind
of feels like we're slowing down, you know, but when you have a team of 20 or 30, then also
that your ability to sort of have a gut feeling of team morale and output and productivity is,
it's pretty hard to have that. So, so we're hoping we can kind of offer an ability for a manager
to look at this data in aggregate. So, not necessarily zooming in on everyone's exact data and
really getting really deep into their data, but understanding more just kind of the team aggregate
and how that's trending. That's cool. So, what are you working on now if you can talk about any of
that at all? Like, what kind of features are you making rolling out soon? Sure. One of the big
things we're working on seeing as rescue time and at the very beginning of this, we got kind of
hammered by a couple of people like, well, why is this an online tool? You know, why don't you just
give me something I can install on my computer and use this? And where rescue time is moving is
kind of in more of a sort of social and benchmarky way so that you can imagine that a team you could
do some comparison stuff, compare yourself to the average team member, and be also compare yourself
to people like yourself. So, if you're a system administrator, you could benchmark yourself against
other system administrators. So, yeah. So, I think and the challenge that we had with that is that,
well, because we've allowed other, you know, allowed our users to kind of categorize all of their
stuff themselves, you know, basically via tags, that people's tags didn't really overlap very
reliably. So, for example, you might tag things as work, and I might tag things as productive,
which are fairly synonymous, but that makes it very difficult to compare you to me in terms of,
you know, two system administrators looking at their time. So, we are actually in the next release,
we're doing kind of these more sticky, kind of permanent categories of application and websites,
so we can kind of get a little bit more ability to compare, and then give people the ability,
and this is something that, you know, some of our users have actually really hot for, is give people
the ability to kind of publicly AC, you know, hey, I'm in the top 5% of, you know, Photoshop guys,
in terms of just sheer amount of time and effort in Photoshop, and be able to kind of publicly
represent that with kind of a, you know, badge, blog widget, you know, Myspace widget, you know,
goofy stuff like that. I don't know if you've ever heard of fat blogging that, you know, a bunch of
people who got into the concept of, you know, blogging about losing weight, right? And it's kind
of a way to keep yourself honest. And so, strangely, a lot of our users want this data to be more
public, to sort of keep them from screwing off as much as they might otherwise screw off. So,
it's kind of a weird motivation, but it's kind of a life hack, right? And it's a way to sort of,
to, you know, make yourself more disciplined than you, than you might otherwise be, which is kind of
cool. The same way that it doesn't actually just say, you know, Mozilla Firefox actually says,
what web page you're on, it would be really great if you could do the same thing with Insta
Messaging, because I find that I waste a lot of my time talking to people I really shouldn't be
talking to while I'm working. And, you know, is that feature coming in time soon? Yeah, so we,
I mean, there's, there's kind of, you know, I mean, within rescue time data, there's a bunch of
black holes. And the, the kind of black hole we attacked out of the gate was the browser. It would
be fairly useless for, for me to say, hey, you spend six hours in Firefox, you know, is that good or
bad? Well, I don't know. But, you know, there's other black holes like I am, which is, I think you're
right. That's, you know, people, you know, you could basically tag people as sort of productive or
good people to talk to or, you know, kind of goof off, buddy, kind of conversations. And similarly,
the email client of, you know, hey, an outlook, you could spend four hours in outlook as a professional,
but that could be good or bad, depending on sort of who you're talking to and, and how you're talking
to them. So, so I think there's, there's kind of other cans that we can open. We don't have the,
kind of, I am an outlook stuff on the near term. One of the other kind of near term things, which
is cool is we have a lot of demand for kind of document and directory understanding. So you can
imagine that you're working on four projects in, you know, say you're a writer and you're working
on four different, you know, actual documents for four different clients. So you're a freelance
person. So to understand sort of, hey, you know, am I working in Acme Incorporated's directory where
I have four or five different documents or am I working on, you know, client B's directory and
to kind of give, you know, people who are, who are multitasking on multiple projects, the ability
to understand, you know, okay, I'm using Microsoft Word, but, but what am I really using it for?
So that's, that's on the play too. And that's, that's probably our most demanded feature.
Cool. One of my favorite companies is Valve. They make the, like, half of two counterstrike kind of
games, right? And they're my favorite company because they're relatively small back when they
first started and they're kind of placed where you can actually call the CEO up and talk to him.
If you wanted to, it's a very transparent kind of company. If you can actually walk in and see
what they're doing, it's an open building. And when I was looking at your, like, support forms,
I really got the sense that like your company was actually talking to people in the community,
like I was actually seeing, you know, people who work there responding back. Would you say that
you're kind of community orientated in some way? There is the, I mean, you could do this company
in a lot of different ways, right? And this is something that we could build this, this big,
you know, monolith company for the enterprise and, and, you know, I'll put on suits. And we're
definitely not that company, right? We did this in a way that was kind of, you know, kind of more
for the worker, for the information worker and the knowledge worker because we, because that's what
we are. And, you know, yeah, we're small. We're three people, you know, we're pre-funding. We are
actually currently fundraising, but we're not looking, you know, we're looking for a, we're looking
to grow to a five person team in the near term, not like to grow to a 50 or 100 person team. And I
think that, you know, the best thing, you know, the best thing that we did with Rescue Time was we
put a little, you know, feedback box on the sidebar of the, basically the entire website, right?
So if you're logged in, you'll see a, you know, hey, what do you think about Rescue Time? And, you
know, and people give us, I mean, we've literally had four or five thousand messages come in through
that little box. And try to respond to a lot of them, you know, but, but yeah, I mean, the
conversations we've had with our users have been so amazing. And so, you know, helpful to sort of
shape the product in a way that kind of, you know, makes Rescue Time into something that people want
rather than, you know, it's easy. A lot of people can try to guess, you know, what kind of product
people want. But, you know, really, I think the best way, and we collectively think the best way
to kind of build a product is to, you know, launch as early as possible. And then, you know,
respond to what the users are saying and doing to try to shape it into something that, you know,
people are really excited and jazzed about. So, so yeah, so we definitely, you know, we are,
we are a high communication company. Sometimes that's pretty horrifying when I look at my own,
you know, time where I, where I spend my time. It's not as much in the development tools and a lot
in the communication tools. But, uh, at the end of the day, I think it's definitely worth it.
Yeah. So I guess it's kind of, you know, really, really soft and I suppose.
Yeah. So if people want to help, uh, what should they do? What can they do?
Well, I mean, we have, uh, we'd love to hear from people. I mean, imagine your audience is fairly,
fairly geeky. We don't have a published API yet, but we've had a bunch of people build,
some cool stuff on top of rescue time. And we'd love to hear from people, you know, with ideas like
that. We had a, a couple guys, one from Mac and one from PC who built a tool to manually push
data to rescue time. So they could, what they wanted to do is essentially track offline time,
like meetings and phone calls. They wanted to be able to push that data to rescue time. So they
built tools to do that. We had a guy make a Linux data collector and that could certainly use,
and we've had a couple people kind of, you know, checking in code for that, but there's always
probably room for help there. And honestly, just use the tool and tell us, you know, what's working
for you and what's not and what's confusing and what's not. And, uh, and help us make a better.
But yeah, I mean, it's really, uh, we just love to, and honestly, the word amount to, if, uh,
if you use it and you like it, you know, tell your friends because that's, uh, right now,
again, we're growing like 9% week over week and that's, you know, near as I can tell,
we can't take credit for any of that. It's all of our users basically, you know,
blogging about it, twittering about it, emailing their friends, you know, just talking about it,
and we get some cool press too. So, uh, so yeah, so, uh, yeah, all of that stuff would be great.
You're going to kill social networking and people find out how much time they actually spend
on these sites. Yeah, we had a, we did, and this is, uh, this should probably hit tech crunch, uh,
here, uh, they're going to write up an article on it supposedly, but, uh, we did some,
some crunching and basically pulled out, uh, about 500,000 man hours out of our database to do some
analysis on. And we found that 44% of the, all of that time represented in those top,
or in those kind of top, uh, two or three hundred applications was communication related. It was
either email, social networking, instant messaging, you know, and these are all people who,
A, people who are, you know, pretty obsessed with productivity, they're trying to be productive,
right? And, uh, you know, there are also people who can see all this data and you'd think,
so you think that our audience is probably better than most, but to think that nearly half of,
you know, production workers, knowledge workers time is spent, essentially just moving
information from one human being to another, uh, you know, it's kind of horrifying. We all think we're,
you know, we're web developers and we're writers and we're artists or whatever, but uh,
turns out we are communicators. That's rather insightful. So if people want to contact you,
what should they do? Uh, well, we have a contact page on our website and we're always open for
stuff like that. Um, you know, there's a, a forum that we link to from our help page where,
you know, people can throw out ideas as well as, you know, kind of bugs and such like that.
And of course, just using the service you'll see on that right hand side of the site,
there's a little feedback box, you know, we sometimes get one word feedbacks that say, cool,
you know, we sometimes get, you know, long essays, uh, you know, people throw out ideas to us.
So anything I can go on that box and we read every single, I mean, the whole team reads every single
one of those. So, uh, so yeah, we do love to hear from people. Where is this location?
Just out of curiosity. This is like your kind of like your house kind of thing or do you actually
have a small office building or what's going on? No, we have an office. We actually, so we, um,
this was a hobby kind of project. It was a side project. We all had day jobs up until,
the first of this year. So around Thanksgiving, last year, we, you know, as we started getting
more and more interest, we decided to apply to Y Combinator, uh, which is, uh, it's a kind of seed
funding, uh, very hacker centric kind of geek centric seed funding outfit, uh, out of Silicon
Valley, uh, led by a guy named Paul Graham, who's a pretty famous software essayist, uh, in the,
one of the big kind of list guys. Um, anyway, so, uh, so we applied to Y Combinator and they,
I don't know, they get, I don't, they don't release the numbers anymore, but they get in the
thousands of applicants, uh, you know, per six month session and we, uh, uh, we got the nod for
that. So they picked 20 companies out of those thousands of applicants and, uh, so we've been, uh,
up until the end of March, uh, up until I guess April one, uh, we're in Silicon Valley, uh,
working with Y Combinator and have since returned to Seattle, uh, and have a small office in Pioneer Square.
So yeah, so we are, uh, we are, we are a real business with a real office, uh, but it is definitely
small. Okay, if people have any, you know, questions or comments for you, do you have like an email
address or a phone number where you can be reached? Yeah, you can shoot to, uh, team TAM at rescuetime.com,
and that gets, uh, basically all three team members. Uh, and, uh, we don't actually, uh, maintain a
business phone. Uh, if you go to the contact page, you'll see a phone number and it is my cell phone.
Uh, and, uh, I, I, I take all sorts of bizarre calls on that number, but, uh, but I'm probably not
particularly eager to say it on a podcast, but it's on the contact page. So, uh, so people really want
to talk with my voice. Uh, I'm willing. Oh, can't say I blame you. Okay. Well, you know, thank you for
your time and thank you so much for being here. No worries. Thank you. Okay. See you.
Okay. Well, that was the interview with Tony Wright, the founder of rescuetime.com.
If you have any questions or comments from me, I'm not sure what you would, but if you do,
you can email me at drakenewisatgemo.com. If you need some, uh, other form of
way to contact me, um, I have a ton listed on my about page at drakenewis.com. Um, okay. Great.
Thank you for listening to Haqqa Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by kero.net. So head on over to caro.enc for all of the teams.
