I love good web apps, and last week I found a really good app for tracking my time.

It’s not about tracking time for customers, but more about tracking my personal time, what I do during the day, how much time I spend working, playing, surfing and blogging.

I think it’s a good idea to track these kinds of things; you can really work out how much time during the day is going to waste, and set yourself goals to make improvements.

Anyway, the app is called RescueTime, you don’t have to manually log anything, it has a windows or mac background process that tracks the apps your using and when you’re using them and it sends the data to their server and you can login and check how much time you spend in the day doing certain things.

You can also tell it what apps are productive and what aren’t, so for me, business based apps that I use I mark as productive, and games I play I mark as not productive, and you get stats on how productive your week is compared to previous weeks and you also get breakdowns on where your spending your time, playing games, working or blogging etc.

It’s great for people like me who have a tendency to not want to work at times and get sidetracked easily on new things, it makes me accountable to me, I can check WTF I was doing and think to myself, okay, stop it, get into doing work.

I think that’s a big thing when you work for yourself, you’re not really accountable to anyone but yourself and a tool like this really helps drive that point, you can look at it and say, as an employee of my own business, my time spent during the day was good or bad, and reward or discipline yourself depending on what you’ve done.

You can also set yourself goals, like I want to spend 6hrs+ a day on work tasks, or spend 1hr a day or less on playing games or blogging, and you can track those goals. It’s always good to set yourself goals, you need to reward yourself and feel good about what you do.

On top of that I have employees, so I’m now tracking their time using the app too, I don’t have to watch them so close, I can monitor them online to what they are spending their day doing!