The data that I’ve been getting from RescueTime about what I do all day has been quite fascinating. I’m not a productivity freak, but it’s interesting to have such detailed data on my own behaviour. So far, I have two main observations. One is that I waste a lot less time than I thought. Of course, there is an endogeneity problem — maybe knowing that I’m being monitored has changed my behaviour. But either way, it’s good news. Second is that online chat takes up a surprising amount of time. You don’t realise it because you’re usually flipping between the chat window and other things, but it can easily add up to one or two hours per day.

Anyway, after using RescueTime for a bit, I logged on to my online banking this morning and was immediately struck by the paucity of information that the bank provides me about my finances. Maybe my bank is just lame compared to others, but I only get my balances and a long unstructured list of my transactions. In RescueTime, you tag applications and websites to categorise them and you can see trends for tags. You can also rate each tag in terms of its productivity on a scale from -2 to +2, and RescueTime calculates a weighted average productivity score that you can track over time. Plus you can set goals for various metrics.

So I was thinking it would be great to have similar features in online banking. Let people tag their transactions and then generate a few graphs to show trends over time. Goals could also be very useful. I know there is personal accounting software that does this stuff, but since the bank already has all the transactions data, they can save the clumsy steps of exporting and importing the data into a separate program.