Your Time is Held Hostage, Rescue it With Rescuetime

It's fall 2010 and I'm wondering to myself where has the time gone, all the while binge browsing through the web. I didn't like the feeling that I wasn't in control of myself, the web had taken hold of me with it's endless distractions. I love technology, and I realized I wanted to be more than a consumer of it, but someone who used the web as a productive tool to produce more.

Flash forward to 6 years later and I've logged over 10, 000 productive hours online that I've tracked with Rescuetime.[

Reading a productivity blog, I stumbled upon rescuetime as a way to help track how I spend my time online. Back then, I was a big fan of Massive multiplayer online role-playing games. Although I had given up TV and console games, I had little productivity gains as MMORGs filled up that time.

We all have our own choice of entertainment that may take up significantly more time than we realize. Rescuetime allowed me to see the raw numbers of how much actual time that was for me. When I first saw them I was shocked, I almost cried. I spent almost 2–3 hours per day or 40–60 hours per month. Then came the denial, these numbers couldn't be right. A part of me almost wanted to stop using rescuetime!

For other people those could be your actual time spent on facebook, instagram, twitter, youtube, netflix or whatever form of entertainment that gets in the way of you living your life in my productive ways.

Why would I want to change my behavior? I loved those games. I was having fun. I was even meeting friends online through it.

The core problem I realized was entertainment's ability to disconnect you from reality, distort your sense of time and drive you towards overconsumption.

I needed to take back control of my time. I would use Rescuetime as the tool to bring awareness, find insights and take action. Eventually, Rescuetime would become as important to me and as internet connection. If I am to continue to use the internet as a utility, I would need a meter to track my usage.

Key RescueTime Features:

• Online Time Tracking, which can be paused or stopped.
• Set alerts to let you know when you spent a certain amount of time on an activity.
• Block distracting websites by choosing an amount of time to focus and RescueTime will block those websites.
• Receive Weekly email updates on how your time was spent.
• Log highlights about what you accomplished during the day.
• Set productivity goals

Dashboard

The main view of Rescuetime presents you with a dashboard with a top row that shows you the amount of time tracked for the time period, a bar graph of your productivity overtime, a productivity score which shows your productivity ratio including a percent change of how you compared to the prior time frame, and a category breakdown of how your time was spent.

The second row shows a spotlight of your top activities for that time period, that can be broken down by total, daily pattern or changes over time.

The third row shows your goals for that time period. And the last row shows your lifetime milestones including the total time logged since you've been using rescuetime, your total productive and distracting time.

How Often Should I Look At My Data?

After you've setup the application it begins tracking data in the background. You can keep browsing the web as you normally do. Some may try to be more productive straight away, now that they are tracking their usage, but after a while you're normal patterns will appear; that's ok in the beginning.

Here's how often I recommend you categorize and observe your data:

• For the First Month: Categorize Data Weekly
• For the next Two Months: Categorize Data Every 2 Weeks
• After 3 Months: Categorize Data Monthly

Categorizing Data

When rescuetime collects data, some sites are intelligently categorized by the service, but there are still a large portion of sites that you may have to categorize.

To do this, go to Reports and then Categories. There you will see the top categories. Find and select the ‘Uncategorized' category.

You'll see a list of activities and on the right hand side you click the edit icon (pencil) and select the right category and productivity type.