I used to use RescueTime to track how I was spending time on my computer as well as blocking things that were distracting but I had so many problems with it I gave up. I see there’s this thing ManicTime—about ManicTime on Lifehacker—but that’s for Windows only.<p>The problem for me is that RescueTime is pretty much exactly what I want. It’s in the cloud, works on Windows and Mac, allows me to block things I don’t want to be distracted by, etc. But the team behind the product just seem to be a bit incompetent. I’ve been using it for years and I’ve seen little to no improvement. Last time I used it the blocking features had broken completely for me, it took them forever to implement a weak—read: of no use—feature for recording time spent on specific projects instead of in specific applications, they had a serious bug on their website that prevented a particular feature from working which they hadn’t even noticed until I told them about it.<p>The dream is for my computer to keep information of what I’m doing:<p><pre><code> * which programs I’m using
* which files I have open
* which folders those files are in
* which websites I’m visiting
* the emails I’m reading/writing and to whom
* relationships between these things that give
greater insight than those things on their own
</code></pre>
…store this in an organized way that I can train and improve and present useful statistics to me. (Couldn’t the first three on this list be achieved with some systems programming roughly equivalent to the implementations of <i>ps</i> and <i>lsof</i> UNIX commands? It can’t be that hard.) Then later you could also start thinking about making this work on smartphones.<p>As an idea for a startup this seems like a complete no-brainer to me. If you are someone who has the capability to get a reasonably sized team of <i>actual good developers</i> with some vision and discipline together then you can probably trounce the existing competition and there must be tons of people who need this kind of functionality.