Friday
Sep052008
Track your productivity... or lack thereof
Friday, September 5, 2008 at 11:35AM
Lately I've been wondering how efficient I really am with my time at my job. I know that occasionally surf rather than work, but I do it almost subconsciencously so it's difficult to know how much time I actually spend working as opposed to not working.
by CarbonNYC
I started looking for a way to monitor this and I ran across this application yesterday that allows you to track your use of different programs and websites throughout the day. It's called RescueTime.
It's a small application that you install to monitor your computer use, and then it uploads the results to a site for you to organize, tag, and view.
It's proving to be a very useful and fun tool. It allows you to see how much time you specifically spent on different programs, tasks, and sites. You can then rank those things by productivity, and it produces an efficiency score for the day/week/month.
Here's some of my charts for the day so far:
As you can see, not alot of time spent working. That's because it's before noon and I spent about 45 minutes writing a blog post this morning.
The cool thing is that it really motivates you to work harder. When you essentially have a high-score to beat, it makes it much easier to keep yourself focused on the task at hand.
I would definitely recommend this to anyone who cares about time management, it's an awesome little program.
by CarbonNYC
I started looking for a way to monitor this and I ran across this application yesterday that allows you to track your use of different programs and websites throughout the day. It's called RescueTime.
It's a small application that you install to monitor your computer use, and then it uploads the results to a site for you to organize, tag, and view.
It's proving to be a very useful and fun tool. It allows you to see how much time you specifically spent on different programs, tasks, and sites. You can then rank those things by productivity, and it produces an efficiency score for the day/week/month.
Here's some of my charts for the day so far:
As you can see, not alot of time spent working. That's because it's before noon and I spent about 45 minutes writing a blog post this morning.
The cool thing is that it really motivates you to work harder. When you essentially have a high-score to beat, it makes it much easier to keep yourself focused on the task at hand.
I would definitely recommend this to anyone who cares about time management, it's an awesome little program.
tagged charts, ethic, management, productivity, rescue, rescuetime, time, work in Interesting Sites
charts, ethic, management, productivity, rescue, rescuetime, time, work in Interesting Sites 
Reader Comments (4)
Fun though it sounds - and I do get a bit unreasonably excited by stats (can't get enough of checking my blog stats page) - I think I'd rather be kept in the dark about such matters!
You wouldn't want me to have to cull reading your blog from my list of time wasting activities now would you?
Yeah we can't have that!
I'm also finding that I'm beginning to spend a great deal of time on my time management now, which sorta defeats the purpose.
Hi there - We've recently introduced a new version of our time and activity analytics solution, Slife v2.0. It's now available for Mac/Windows and you can extend it to multiple users with Slife Teams.
http://www.slifelabs.com
http://www.slifeteams.com
It's similar to RescueTime in some ways. Give it a try - the Slife client is free. We would love to know what you think.
That's great, I'll take a look at it. It was your product that was originally recommended to me so I'll try it out.
Thanks
Eric