You’ll see in a few moments that my normal hours spent on my laptop is nearly double the first week. Here’s what the First Week of RescueTime looked like, with a pesky house guest I thoroughly enjoy technology and creating things on it (conversations or otherwise). *And truthfully, the only reason I feel any guilt at all is because of societal stereotypes about over-working. I was happy to figure this out by using RescueTime, because I tend to feel guilty that I’m on my laptop too much*. The reason being? I may use my laptop from 7am – 7pm, but it’s definitely not 60 minutes of usage per hour. One of the big revelations for me on the first day of tracking my time was that I would have guessed I spend 10-12 hours on my laptop each day. The middle of the day isn’t totally unproductive time, but I do find myself taking more breaks from my computer and doing other things (what entrepreneur doesn’t knock out laundry at 1pm on Mondays?). I’ve known this about myself, but RescueTime reaffirmed the fact that I’m most productive early in the morning or late at night. Utilities: This category should have been renamed, but it was solely tracking time spent on the staging version of my brand new website (which you’re viewing now).Business: Answering support tickets for my various software products, and writing articles.Communication: Interacting with people in Slack Channels and answering emails.However, I fairly quickly righted the ship, and had a few hours of my most productive time of the day. What kind of psycho just dives head-first into being productive? I give myself about 30 minutes to scroll through Instagram, make coffee with the Chemex, and watch a few random YouTube videos while eating breakfast, so it wasn’t surprising for me to see some of my least productive time during that first hour. My typical workday starts, alarm-free, at around 7am. I have almost every notification turned off, and I ignore 99.9% of phone calls I get (ha!) Let’s look at Day One of tracking my productivity with RescueTime I removed all social apps except Instagram, and only check that twice per day. I’ve disconnected myself from doing almost anything on my phone. This came in handy when it didn’t know what to do with sites like ProductHunt, Medium, and a handful of others (more on this in a minute as well).įor the purposes of my experiment with RescueTime, I opted not to install the app on my iPhone. The only thing I knew to check because RescueTime told me to, was to review a day’s activity in my Dashboard and make sure the websites I was visiting (or programs I was using) were being categorized correctly. Once the app was installed, it does everything for you. The great thing about RescueTime is that it’s 100% free to track your basic info, and it takes a matter of minutes to set up: Where did it all start? Installing the RescueTime app and telling myself to forget I’d ever installed it. Starting My Journey To Increased Productivity With RescueTime That’s where I hoped RescueTime would come to the, well, rescue! #worthitīut that’s not the norm for me, and I wanted to see if and where I was losing potentially productive time. And if they didn’t, what was taking their place? Last week, for example, see that 3-hour block on Tuesday that I was supposed to spend onĬYDI emails and planning? Yeah…I rescheduled that for this weekend and took a tech-free afternoon off with my wife Caroline. Just putting blocks of time on my calendar doesn’t mean those tasks get completed by magic. I could guess and assume that I was correct about getting stuff done, but was I actually right? Let’s be honest…There’s always some fudging when there’s no real accountability. (Hehe, yeah, I schedule my haircut and beard trimming sometimes.) By looking at the blocks of time on my calendar and asking Did I do that thing?, I could get a basic idea of how productive I was. Instead, I’ve let Google Calendar dictate my daily schedule, and I regularly refer back to it as a way to track my productivity. How was I tracking my productivity and time before RescueTime? It’s simply something I wanted to test out for 30 days and learn from the data and results. Note: I am NOT being paid by RescueTime to write this article. I used the RescueTime App to do all the detailed tracking for me and wrote weekly updates which you can read below! That’s why I decided to track every hour on my devices for 4 weeks. Like you, I know I spend the majority of my waking hours connected to technology and am always looking for ways to improve my productivity.
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