This is The World According to Buchs - Keepin’ it moving since 2003!
How productive are you?
I stumbled across a very cool web app today. I typically spend a good 30 minutes first thing in the morning reading items from my various RSS feeds that look interesting, and this one fit the bill.
RescueTime is a free tool that sits in your taskbar (or menubar, if you’re on a Mac). Once you start it running, it keeps track of how much time you spend in any application or website. It feeds that data to the RescueTime website every 30 minutes, where you can get a look at how much time you’ve been spending on things like YouTube, eBay, and actual work. How often do you slog through a workday, get distracted by email and reading about George Clooney’s girlfriend, and at the end of the day wonder where it all went?
You’ll need to spend some time telling the app about what each thing you do means. For instance, I tagged “www.espn.com” as “sports” and indicated that it was a -2 on the productivity scale. Dreamweaver was tagged “work”, and got a +2. Gmail and GoogleTalk are both “communication”, and got a 0. After you do that, the app starts feeding you back stats on how efficient and productive your time has been. You can drill down to the tag level and see where your time went, and you can also get overview by date range. I’m a data junkie, and I think it’s awesome. The charts are clean and concise, and actually make sense.
RescueTime doesn’t care about how you spend your time in an application - it can’t tell if I’m on GoogleTalk with my co-workers or my friends. That’s not a bad thing - it’s not intended to generate a billable timesheet, it’s just a tool to help me judge how I’m using my time. “Communication” is generally un-productive, and that’s good enough.
I’ve tried using various job timers in the past, but never got into the habit of starting/stopping the timer when I moved from one task to the next. The fact that there I don’t have to do anything and still get the level of detail I’m getting - FOR FREE - is great.