RescueTime

[CoolBee]

In theory I have about 15 hours a day to be productive. Truth is, I find it hard to be productive for more than 3 hours a day yet I spend hours and hours in front of this computer!

I've had RescueTime on my computer for months, unloved and unvisited so today I visited.
Ahem in the past 6 days - Social Networking over 11 hours, Pavlina over 11 hours... I wondered where all my time went, now I know!
'Uncategorized' about 9 hours!

RT scores social networking with productivity -2 and Pavlina as 'business intelligence +2' (ahem and if I believe that I believe anything! LOL!)

Anyway, I've decided to put some effort in to recategorizing the most often visited websites and softwares but not to the nth degree unless something starts taking up a lot of time again (like say more than 3 hours a week).

The free version only gives you a month - I think I'll pay a bit more attention to it and see how it goes and then maybe upgrade to the year version - but I think I know what it would say right now!


Ah - just discovered with the paid version you can block sites it deemed 'productivity -2' however it automatically includes instant messengers of various versions as -2 which is where I do a lot of my coaching work! So if you get this software, make sure you check out carefully the assigned productivity levels for different software and assign your own where necessary!

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[AnneC]

Hi Steve,

I like RescueTime, but I generally use an Outlook Add-in called Qlockwork to track all my PC activity, and I find that browsing accounts for less that half my time wasting - the worst time wasting I do is email related. I spend way too much time reading emails rather than actually acting. It helped massively to turn off all email notifications; sometimes I spend a day with my email cut off and tell my team to phone me if there's a crisis. That's rather effective, particularly as I find that a session of web browsing is often initially triggered by an email.

Anne.

[Shane]

I also use RescueTime. I'm not quite sure after reading your post: Do you know that you can edit the productivity settings in RT? So, you can set stevepavlina.com to be a 0 or -2 or whatever you want to rate it.

I had to go through quite a few sites and adjust the settings, otherwise the results would have been skewed, in my opinion.

[Scipio]

Is there a freeware software similar to Rescuetime?

[CoolBee]

Originally Posted by Shane

I also use RescueTime. I'm not quite sure after reading your post: Do you know that you can edit the productivity settings in RT? So, you can set stevepavlina.com to be a 0 or -2 or whatever you want to rate it.

I had to go through quite a few sites and adjust the settings, otherwise the results would have been skewed, in my opinion.

Yes, I have been recategorizing (sorry if not clear in OP!) as sites I use for my paid work (instant messengers) it classed as -2 (playtime basically) and pavlina was down as productivity +2 - much as love SP the hours I spend on here can in no way be classed as highly productive! LOL! I reclassified this site to 0 (neutral).

One of my problems is that most of the sites I spend most time on are dual purpose - so like up to 30 mins a day checking emails, forums etc would be productive, spending 300 mins isn't!

RescueTime is freeware in terms of you can categorize sites, reassign probabilities, get a weekly report, daily report and details. You have to pay if you want annual analysis and the ability to block 'unproductive' sites (be sure to classify yourself!!!) at certain times of day.

[Kindred]

If you need to block unproductive websites, check out LeechBlock for Firefox. It lets you set a limited amount of time per an interval for sites or a group of sites. In the case of this site, I have 15 minutes set for every 12 hours on stevepavlina.com and other productivity sites I visit.

I've been using RescueTime for ages, and it has done wonders to opening my eyes to where my time was going. I use to score a -1.5 daily and now a 1.0 is the norm (mind you, it took me over 8 months to get it consistently up here).

However, one of the things I don't like about RescueTime is that it's hard to get a picture of what my work day was like. Are unproductive tasks intertwined with what I'm doing, or am I failing to just get started on something?

I wrote a ghetto program to take a snapshot of my desktop every 5 minutes and save it into a folder with a timestamp. At the end of the day I spend 5 minutes going through all the snapshots like a movie to see where I can improve my work ethic.

[Manomanman]

Don't depend on a product to create self-discipline within you. Use it as a tool, an aide, but the drive must come from deep within.