Resuce Your Day With RescueTime
If you are a Type A personality like me, you are always trying to fit more in a day. I sit down at my computer to begin my day at work and before I know it, it’s time for lunch. I tell myself “I’ve been pretty productive but after lunch I need to try even harder to get my task list chopped down to a manageable size for tomorrow.” I get back to work and soon enough it’s the end of the day and I wonder, “Where did my day go?”
I listened to a Podcast by Scott Hanselman about being more productive which had great ideas on how to focus and gave suggestions for free tools such as RescueTime which is a time management software that can help you stay on task by tracking your day. It helps you see what part of the day, week or month you are most productive (shown below) so you can schedule your day according to when you are likely to be most productive. It will also show you what things are distracting you from being most productive so you can be aware to limit or avoid them. As you can see, I am not a morning person!
To begin, create an account. After selecting your package, you enter your personal information and begin by setting your goals for the software to track – such as how many hours each day you must be on productive time and how many hours of distracting time are allowed. We all need a little escape between tasks to clear our head so don’t eliminate that category!
The software will track where you have spent your time and if you set it for meetings, phone calls and other non-computer related things, it will track those also and give you a list like the one below. The list is customizable so if it lists something like Twitter or Facebook as a distraction and you use a social network as part of your job it can be changed from an unproductive task to productive by clicking the + button next to the productivity score. Therefore, it will add positive value to your efficiency score rather than detracting from it.
RescueTime works in the background so you don’t have to remember to log in or out and if you step away from your computer to do other things, it automatically knows and will go into idle mode. When you return, it will start collecting data again. If you use iGoogle as your home page or a page to track tasks and the world around you, you can add the RescueTime Gadget which will give you a quick view of how you are doing and will generate a weekly email so you know whether or not you are on track with your weekly goals.
I have been using RescueTime since I first heard of it and have found it to be a great tool to get more done in a day. To make it more of a fun tool I use it like a game against myself to see how high I can get my efficiency score and how many points I can score per week in the categories. It can also be a great tool to use with your employer when it is time for a review because it tracks daily, weekly, monthly and yearly activity so you can show them your productivity during the year which they might otherwise not know! Go check it out and claim back several hours a day of your productive work time!
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