No but seriously, I used to use RescueTime and had a similar problem, certain Apps, like TextMate, Preview, MailPlane, and under certain circumstances, Adium have different productivity ratings based on how you’re using them. Preview can be used for reading PDFs for school, for work, and for personal, so how do you distinguish that?

Similarly, I actually did used to write some of my assignments in TextMate (the ones that didn’t need to be printed or formatted, just e-mailed). Same thing with MailPlane, I could be writing a long philosophical e-mail to Sam or an e-mail to my TA, etc.

This is why I abandoned RescueTime. It’s an novel idea, but the implementation leads to inaccurate data. The only accurate and meaningful purpose I think it can hold is telling you how much time you spend on Apps that are completely uni-lateral, which ends up being a minority. Oh and also for which websites you spend time on.

On a side-note, I think it’d be interesting for it to show idle time graphed. In other words, I’d like to see how many times (and how long) I walk away from my computer in what I’d call “one session”.