In the the latest evolution of my never-ending quest to spend way more time determining whether I am productive, than actually being productive, I signed up for RescueTime. It is a relatively painless process that includes a little client app the monitors what you do on on your computer, then reports back to the RT mothership. The website produces various reports about the applications and websites you use, as well as allowing you to develop some arbitrary “effeciency scores” by rating your different activities. The new widget on the right sidebar of our blog is their “Top 10 Apps and Sites” feature (available once you sign up), loaded with my data for about the past month.
Once I sort of moved past the “neato” factor (which for me can usually take quite some time), I took a look at the data. Couple things jump out at me. Some good, some bad.
Good Things:
- 9 of the 10 are actually work related. Google Reader and Skype may be a bit of a stretch, but for the sake of argument, let’s consider those in the tent.
- App (site) number 2 is the BearingPoint Wiki. Transparency is always a crowd favorite, so spending this much time in the clear is probably good.
Bad Things:
- Email. Look at all of that email. And I am pretty militant about not using email. But it is safe to say that the vast majoirty of information I produce is opaque, temporary, and otherwise non-resuable. That is a check minus on the E2 report card for sure.
- Twitter (twhirl). It is microblogging right? I seem to spend way more time there than on my macro blog. I tend to think that I am getting distracted by the noise. But those Hoosier Stats are hard to ignore!
2 responses so far ↓
1 Austin Wheelock // Jan 22, 2009 at 9:11 am
Nate – I think you need to determine the efficiency and efficacy of your email usage before claiming it is a total negative. While I agree (and you know I do) with your perspectives on the downsides of email communication in general, I think there is likely an inherent value in the emails you send particularly to those who do not use other communications channels.
Too bad you cannot tag certain email addresses as “unproductive” email addresses (say, some corporate email that forces you to provide an inane and useless data call or a non-work related friend). Then you fine tune your productivity on email.
On the twitter issue, it seems that the question is whether your twitter usage directly relates to your current work objectives. Clearly, Twitter is productive in other ways – creating an online presence, keeping up on niche topics, communicating with far flung teams, etc. Again, since it merges work and personal usage it is hard to say how productive or non-productive you really are.
I am still on the fence for twitter. I think it is a great way to info and interact with people you would never have a chance to meet otherwise (the value of should not be understated, but I have found it to be VERY distracting to the point of having to turn off tweetdeck to get other work done.
2 Jay Neely - Boston Entrepreneur & Web Strategist // Feb 3, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Hey Nate, I recently started using RescueTime, too. Another good app is Mint, which is to your money like RT is to your time. And I just wrote a post about switching to Google Reader for its Trends feature, which shows me where my time is being spent in my feed reader (something RescueTime can’t do):
http://socialstrategist.com/2009/02/03/self-knowledge-good-for-entrepreneurship-excellent-for-info-overload
To respond to Austin’s comment, one of the other things I wrote about are apps like Xobni and ClearContext, which will help you figure out how you’re spending your time in e-mail, and where the most value comes from there. I see by your RescueTime widget that Outlook is your #1 time suck; you should definitely check those apps out.
Good post. If you find some other apps that provide these kind of metrics for our regular activity, please, let me know!
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