Steve Dotto here.
Today, we are going to talk about real productivity.
What percentage of time that you spend on your computer would you say you spend doing
productive tasks?
Do you think you spend 60% of your time that you’re sitting at your computer actually
doing something that’s worthwhile and work-related, or is it somewhat less?
Could it be somewhat more?
I think most of us don’t have the slightest idea what percentage of time that we sit at
our computer that we’re doing things that we would classify as productive.
Well, there’s a tool that may help dispel any myths that we have on our mind about just
how productive we are.
It’s called RescueTime.
It’s free.
It’s a little app that get go to their website, you install the app and give the app permission
to basically spy on you.
It becomes a snitch.
It sits there and watches everything you do.
At the end of the day, the end of the week, or the end of the month, it tells you, “Steve,
you spent this much time in productive tasks, and you spent this much time not so productive.”
I’m not sure I always appreciate the little missives I receive from Rescue Time but I
think it’s a good tool.
I think it’s one well worth looking at.
If you are committed to getting more out of your time at the computer, well, it might
be an app that you want to install.
You basically install it Mac or Windows where it installs just fine on your computer.
You have to give it permission to basically be running all the time and monitoring activities.
Once you do that, it then logs everything that you do.
It installs on my Mac and into the Menu Bar.
Here at the very top you see the little Rescue.
There’s a little cross with little hands on it like a clock.
If I go into the dashboard for it, it basically watches my web browser and tells me exactly
my activities for different periods of time.
You can of course change the range of time you want to look at.
But let’s look at the week of June 3rd to the 9th.
For me that week, I ended up being out 40 hours of total time at the computer, averaging
at just under six hours a day at my desk 63% productivity which I think is actually pretty
darn good.
I will point out that this is before I installed Diablo 3.
I think the following week, my productivity may have plummeted somewhat.
Let’s take a look at what I did over that time I was 63% productive.
It gives you different graphics that show you how productive you are by different days.
We can see I have some very Wednesdays.
That’s the day I produce my radio show and lots of work goes into that.
Then it basically breaks it down into different categories, social activities, depending on
criteria that you establish as being important.
We take a look at some of the other reports they create.
I think this one here is the most useful.
It’s the Overview Report and it basically tells you all of the different activities
and how they classify whether or not you were productive those days.
If you take a look, I’ve said email is actually ‘neutral’.
Well, I’m going to change that setting or actually RescueTime is.
Email is a neutral activity.
It can be wasteful as well as positive time.
I think my time spent in email is very productive because it’s my main way of communicating
so I’m going to actually change that productivity from ’neutral’ and weight it more as ‘productive’
time.
Here’s another case where you’re going to want to modify it as you move along.
They consider YouTube time to be spent being very distracting.
That’s because YouTube is basically seen by RescueTime as an entertainment vehicle.
Well for me, producing these videos, it’s a part of what I do to make a living so it’s
not very distracting at all.
As a matter of fact, I don’t even use YouTube for anything except what I consider to be
very productive time.
I don’t just browse around YouTube looking for fun stuff.
No, when I’m at YouTube, I’m modifying my files.
I am checking my analytics.
I am responding to people that are writing to me about different things.
I’m doing real work.
As you can see, we can go through all the different sites basically and activities that
they consider to be productive or not, productive or neutral and we can modify them.
This means that we can tailor how RescueTime looks at our daily activities and then help
us to determine if we’re productive or not.
Now, they have a few other different types of reports.
This is an interesting one that they create which allows you to take a look at how much
time you spend on an average day being productive and then they compare it.
On a day that you’re really good, this is the sort of numbers that you reach.
I reached 73% on our most productive days, telling me what activities I’m engaged in.
On my least productive days, I’m down to 49% and as I say, when I did this particular
run of data, that was pre-Diablo 3.
We might have a new low in productivity if I was to run a report on the last week of
time.
It is a free application.
You can upgrade to a paid subscription and the main tools that they give you is some
deeper tracking, a little more detail and they also add a tool which is called Get Focused.
Get Focused basically creates a timer.
In a period of time, they will actually block what you classify as distracting sites from
you.
Now some people do this in different ways.
There are word processors, for example, that make your entire screen completely white so
there’s nothing distracting as you’re doing writing.
It’s going to work in a similar kind of theme to that where it’s going to block
you away from the things that distract you and allow you to focus on other things that
you consider most productive.
So that’s one of the additional features that is in the paid version.
There’s also team editions which I think you’re going to have to think long and hard
about if you want to use or not, basically allow your boss or a coworker to be able to
monitor your productivity or you’re going to monitor your employees’ productivity.
I think you’re going to have to take a good, hard look at the corporate culture and how
you want to approach the ability to be able to look and see, basically spying I guess
some people would think, on other people’s activities and the sort of activities that
they are involved in on the internet.
I can see where it’s appealing on one side.
I can also see where it could be disturbing on the other side.
Overall, I’ve had RescueTime installed in my system now for five or six months and I’m
going to keep it.
I like it.
Every week, it sends me an email which is a summary of my activities in the past week.
There’s my email.
It arrives at a time that it makes me think and allows me to kind of get back and focus
on tasks.
I don’t actively think about RescueTime sitting there, looking at me and seeing whether
I’m going to be productive or not.
I don’t strive to get really high marks, but it does tell me whether I’m focused
or whether I’m not.
If I noticed a trend downwards, I say, “Well, what is it that’s distracting me?
Is there some external force in my life that I can maybe pay attention to so that I can
pump that productivity back up to where I want it to be.
I’m Steve Dotto.
I hoped that you found this video useful.
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this one that are just as useful.
Thanks for spending time with me today.