Real Productivity Measurement: Using RescueTime, Post #1
Last week, I watched Robert Scoble interview Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek. One of the topics, as expected, was about improving productivity.
Tim mentions a utility called RescueTime, which runs as an application on your computer and records what applications you’re using, and for how long. It also goes so far as to look at the URLs of the pages you’re viewing in your web browser, so that you can see what websites you visit most often. For some of you, you may not want that…but I digress.
I’ve been running it for about a week now, and finally have a decent dataset to work with. Tim reminded me of a great quote by someone who has been an influence to me, Peter Drucker; “What gets measured gets managed.”
In case you’re curious about my experience, and if it’s something that might help you, here’s a screen shot of my activity charts:
I’m still digging in to the utility, but it already points out two things:
- I spend a lot of time on social networking websites.
- I spend a lot of time on e-mail.
I wonder if I can outsource parts of those?
What are your thoughts on having a separate email account for social networks (Twitter, etc), and having a virtual assistant manage those emails and account maintenance (following, etc), and letting me know when I need to take action? What if I had a VA handle my Online Reputation Monitoring and monitored it in a similar manner?
At the least, this makes it very apparent that I should probably set aside time for e-mail and social networks, rather than keeping those tabs very readily available. 
Thanks for the update! I too am digging around with RescueTime.
I have outsourced all my social media and most of my email to a VA with great success. He forwards me any important emails that require my decision. He also monitors my online presence with myspace and facebook.
The next step will be to have my VA run RescueTime on his computer so I can manage productivity. The only challenge is that he will have to remember to turn it on while he works and turn it off while he isn’t working. I don’t imagine he will want me monitoring all of his daily activities apart from work.
Good Luck,
Ray