RescueTime: Instant Accountability
Change is hard. So how do you stack the deck in your favor when you’re trying to make and sustain productivity changes (like learning Total, Relaxed Organization or GTD, or breaking an unproductive time use habit)? A slick, free, and effective tool called RescueTime is your powerful ally in changing time use. As a productivity coach, I love this tool, both for myself and my clients.
Run, don’t walk, and install RescueTime now. I mean it.
Advantages
The tag line for RescueTime is “Ridiculously Easy Time Management and Analytics.” They aren’t lying. If you use a Windows PC or Mac, you can install and get running in a couple of minutes. The reports, with no tweaking, give immediate feedback and instant motivation to focus on more important activities.
That’s just the beginning. You can establish goals and automatically see your progress. You can associate tags with applications and web sites, so your time in those places is automatically classified. You can establish and share group time use reports while maintaining privacy, so the progress of the group improves. Way cool.
Why It Works: Accountability
If you really want to make a change, accountability is critical. Think about the word “accountability” and you’ll see important connotations. You have to measure something, and you have to reconcile expected and actual performance. What we measure, improves; when that improvement is reported and reviewed, the pace of change accelerates. This is true whether you’re accountable to yourself or to someone else.
However, accountability to others is profoundly more effective than accountability to ourselves. RescueTime makes it easy to be accountable to your boss, productivity coach, mentor, or peer. Just add them to your group and/or share your weekly productivity report with them (it’s an automatic option), and voila! Instant accountability.
Any Drawbacks?
I was concerned that RescueTime might chew up system resources, but not to worry. It only used between 1 and 5 MB of RAM on my system, adjusting memory use rapidly to keep its footprint to a minimum. Still, the first few minutes my system did run notably slower. Trog Bar struggled to slide out, so something was taxing the CPU. Windows Task Manager said Firefox was the culprit, but I had never seen this behavior before RescueTime. Fortunately, the slowdown subsided within minutes and never returned.
I’ve chalked it up to initial indexing and housekeeping.
RescueTime’s biggest weakness is also its strength: time use is automatically calculated by application or web site. Sometimes that just isn’t granular enough. For example, what does “1 hour of Outlook use” mean when you use Outlook as your task list and email client? Were you fiddling with tasks, composing new emails for important sales clients, or reading fluffy “forward this to everyone” emails? RescueTime can’t tell the difference—yet. Give them time.
Feature Suggestions
I’d like to see a widget that lets you tag the current chunk of time for the current app. A feature like that could automatically recommend tags based on which application is running and which tags are most recent or common for that app. They’re working on a public API and developer tools and encourage community development, so this may be doable for anyone motivated and tech-savvy. A few widgets have already been created, including one for OSX that lets you log phone calls and meetings.
The Bottom Line
RescueTime is free for individuals and groups of 1 to 5 people. Larger teams pay a modest monthly fee ($7.95 each) for everyone after the 5th group member, so this targets the corporate world.
My bottom line recommendation: You can’t afford to not install this tool.
Kevin Crenshaw
Productivity Coach, Priacta, Inc.
