Productivity is the most important thing in your career; whether you are slaving away in an office or working for yourself, the more you get done, the less time you need to spend working. Nothing will impact your productivity like properly managing your time. Before you can manage your time, you need to figure out how you currently spend it. I began using RescueTime two months ago to help me identify my timesucks and focus on making my time, particularly in the office, as productive as possible. RescueTime allows users to passively track all of their computer usage, and some of their non-computer time (this part isn’t 100% passive), and provides and easy to use and understand visual representation of the user’s time usage.
There are two versions of RescueTime for individuals. The first is free (the “Light” version) and the second costs $8 per month (”Pro” version). The upgrade to the $8/month option provides users with the names of the documents that are worked on and additional filtering options. I have opted to pay the $8 per month fee because seeing the names of the documents I’ve worked on is a huge help when slicing and dicing how I spend my time.
RescueTime consists of two parts: 1. a download for your computer 2. the website that provides the user interface.
The download is just 2MB and takes a few seconds to download and install on your computer. You MUST install this on all computers that you wish to track. I didn’t see anything mentioned on the RescueTime.com website regarding the use of one account to track time usage on multiple computers, but I have it installed on three of my computers and they all are tracked by my one account without any problems. Once installed, the only part of the program you will see is a small icon in the system tray.
Double clicking on this icon opens a menu which gives you two options:
Both options open up a browser window. The Dashboard will be the most utilized link. This is the interface that provides all time tracking information to a user.
The Dashboard can be configured to show data daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly as well as only for weekdays or weekends.
All time usage is broken into Activities, Categories, and Productivity Rank. Below is a line graph representing my time usage by day for last week.
The same information can be displayed as Activities by Rank.
The above chart is one of the most useful for me. It not only shows me where exactly I spend my time, but also what percentage of my time is spent in the top ten activities. I find this to be effective at showing my productivity for a given day or week, because when a higher concentration of my time is in ten activities or less, I tend to be more productive. I find that I am most productive when this number is above 65%. (Last week I wasn’t terribly productive!)
While the weekly or monthly charts show trends, I find the daily charts to provide the best data for managing my time usage while in the office. My days in the office tend to consist of similar activities, without an emphasis on certain activities on certain days of the week. Examining my time on a daily basis has allowed me to see that I often spend my mornings on non-essential activities, as well as right after lunch, while I am most productive mid-morning. On a weekly basis, my Friday afternoons are when my worst timesucks rear their ugly heads.
RescueTime allows you to assign a productivity ranking to each activity. These rankings range from -2, which is the most distracting, to +2 which is the most productive, with 0 being neutral. This is managed on the same page that allows you to select categories:
As you can see above, RescueTime tracks many programs and websites and sometimes double counts them (google.com vs. Google Chrome). The editing of categories for all of your activities can be very time consuming, so I tend to only edit the category assignments on activities which I spend longer than five minutes on per week (you’ll be amazed how many activities you spend less than five minutes on in a week!).
There are several other graphs and charts that you can add to your dashboard, depending on how you wish to analyze your time.
One tool that is helpful, but only mediocre at serving its purpose, is the “offline” time tracking tool. This senses when you are idle for about five minutes and then asks you what you were doing during that time. You can select three options to be displayed, in addition to “none of your business, don’t log this time.” I have selected “Meeting,” “Phone call,” and “Non-work,” but these fail to embody many of my trips away from my computer.
Another MAJOR shortcoming of the RescueTime program is that it doesn’t allow you to separate your tracking by time of day. Because I use RescueTime on my home and office computers, I would like to be able to separate the work I do between the two locations, but still combine it to analyze it as a whole. To achieve this, the developers could implement a filter that only displays activity for a week during the hours of X and Y on weekdays and then a filter that shows “everything else.” I think we are unlikely to ever see this filter, however, because the majority of RescueTime’s products are focused on enterprise users, most of whom would have no use for this filter.
RescueTime is a fantastic tool that doesn’t take much time to employ. When you first install it, don’t even bother looking at the Dashboard for the first three days; the website needs time to collect user data. Users may wish to use different user names for work and home to allow them to breakdown the time they spend at both locations – this will double the cost if you wish to track the names of the documents you work on, and will be a pain if you ever work from home. A huge improvement would be to add an iPhone app. It would be great to be able to check how much time you have spent working on a specific Excel model at any time. An iPhone app could also let you add activities on the go and track the location of those activities. It would be fanatastic to track how much time you spend grocery shopping or be able to review how much time you spent at each bar on the pub crawl last weekend. Lastly, the tool is only useful if you take the time to analyze how you are spending time and use the data to readjust your time usage accordingly. The tool itself is passive; you must actively implement productivity changes.
Once you get started using RescueTime, you can embed the charts into any website. I have mine embedded on the Time Management page of this site.
Give the free version a try.
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