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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. If you have, give us a
thumbs up and subscribe to us on YouTube, as well. You also can drop by our website
at www.DottoTech.com, where you can find many more videos just like this one that are just
as useful. Thanks for spending time with me today.