Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m feeling inquisitive.
I would like to ask you a question.
How productive are you, really?
How much time do you spend each day in productive activities versus distracted activities?
Do you know?
Most of us don’t.
Most of us think we work hard but the distracted nature of the online world, the fact that
we have notifications coming in email causes us to often jump into and out of productive
activities and it really costs us time as far as productivity is concerned.
There’s a tool that helps if you are willing to use it and that tool is Rescue Time which
we’ll be looking at today on DottoTech.
Rescue Time is one of those tools that you are going to love or you’re going to hate.
There’s probably no in between.
It’s an app that installs in any operating system or it’s a service that installs in
every operating system and it basically is a spy.
It monitors everything that you do in your online life and at the end of the day, it
turns into a snitch and it tells you exactly what you’ve been doing and it judges you.
It says you have been productive or you have been non-productive and it’s your fault.
Let’s take a look.
It’s installed here in the menu bar on this Mac.
As I said, it runs in all operating systems and what it does it gives you a dashboard
of all your activities, giving you a report back on exactly how productive you’ve been.
So far today, the productivity pulse, it says I’ve been 65% productive which isn’t all
that good.
Now in order to make this product, Rescue Time work for you, you have to spend a little
time massaging how it sees your day because some things that it might consider to be non-productive
activities are in fact very productive activities.
It just doesn’t know it yet.
So as it looks at my day, it classifies them into social networking, design and composition,
scheduling, business.
It’s going to basically look at everything you do and it’s going to try and classify
it.
If you want to go in and see more details on whether it considers to be social networking
to be a good activity or not we can click on that and we can see that it says here that
Blab, which I was on earlier, is considered to be a neutral activity.
Twitter, it considers it to be distracting so it doesn’t consider that to be productive
at all and Facebook is neutral.
Well in my life actually, time spent in Twitter is actually quite productive time because
it’s time spent connecting with my community.
So I’m going to go in here and I’m going to edit this so that Rescue Time understands
for future reference and now that Twitter is actually productive time and I’m going
to save that.
And Facebook is more productive that neutral because I’m typically doing Facebook ads
and that sort of stuff so it is also productive time.
So in Blab, I’ll say Blab is neutral.
I’m going to actually say Blab is somewhat distracting because even though I do it, when
I actually have a scheduled Blab myself, it is productive time.
If I’m watching somebody else’s, frankly it’s distracting because I’m not doing
what I should be doing.
So let’s call it exactly what it is and let’s set it up that way.
So now when we go back into our dashboard, we’ll see that our percentages will probably
have changed.
It said I was 62% and now I’m up to 63%.
Oh good heavens, so much better off because now it knows that Twitter is actually a productive
activity.
So you could view your day this way.
You could also go in and view monthly activities and see what you are overall.
On a monthly basis, it says that I’m actually quite productive and it gives you a little
chart.
The one thing you want to spend some time in is going into the uncategorized activities
because these are things that it just doesn’t know.
In this particular case, RelayThat, well that’s actually a graphics application that we’ve
been doing in preparing our video on.
That’s productive time.
I’m actually creating graphics for that.
CoverGeniePro is again productive time.
I’ll go in and I’ll edit that.
So you go through and you make sure that it knows exactly what you’re working on and
what is productive and what’s not.
At the end of the day, it will give you a report, a snapshot of what you’ve been doing
that’s productive and what’s non-productive as far as how you spend your time.
Now at a corporate level, this can actually setup to report back to an employer which
is where I will say there could be a love-hate relationship.
It does snitch and you can create reports back to an administrator.
So it can actually be spying on employees.
Obviously, it’s running in the foreground.
People actually know that it’s installed so that shouldn’t be an issue but that’s
something that you might want to take consideration.
For me, this is a tool that I go back to on a fairly regular basis just to look at exactly
how I’m spending my time and to make sure, as I look for opportunities to perhaps bring
on sub-contractors to work with me in different areas, it tells me what I’m spending my
time on and gives me nice feedback there, not just what’s productive time but also
what is taking up my time.
Well, I hope you found this video today to be useful.
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I can guarantee you time spent with Dotto is classified as productive time.
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Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!