Do You Really Spend Your Days The Way You Want To?
That’s the question the tool called ‘Rescue Time‘ can help answer. And this Rescue Time review will reveal its power, simplicity and value.
One December I reviewed the year… and found that I’d logged 2,721 online hours.
Out of this time,
- 19% was spent on writing (450 hours)
- 11% was invested in learning (273 hours)
- 8% went to other income-generating activity (191 hours)
- 20% had been on social networking (491 hours)
- 14% was consumed by news and entertainment (340 hours)
This distribution was strikingly similar to the previous year, in which I logged 2,975 hours in total.
My “productivity pulse” averaged 48, exactly the same as the year before – which leaves much room for improvement.
So how to improve your time management?
How can you become more efficient – and effective?
How to avoid wasting time, and beat procrastination?
It all begins with a phased approach.
First, address this time management question…
RESCUE TIME REVIEW
Time Management – Do You Know Where Your Time Goes?
I’ve downloaded a time management application called ‘Rescue Time‘. It runs on any desktop computer and tracks your work online.
(There’s also a Smart phone version of ‘Rescue Time’ that’s compatible with Android or iOS phones.)
The app runs in the background, unobtrusively. You won’t even notice it.
Once every week, they’ll send an email with a summary time management report – about how you spent your online time.
It’s eye-opening.
This is how a summary report might look:
When you hover over the bars on the right side, it gives a break-up of which websites or applications you’ve been on – and how much time you’ve spent on each.
You get to assign every activity a ‘productivity rating‘ on ‘Rescue Time‘.
This can range from ‘highly productive‘ to ‘severely unproductive‘, and in the report you’ll get a visual representation of how well and effectively you’re spending time online.
Now, there are some drawbacks and limitations to a time management tool like this.
You may not always log out when you leave the computer to tackle offline tasks. So the tool occasionally over-calculates a specific activity.
But, by and large, it is an accurate and fair representation of the time you’ll spend on various sites and activities.
RESCUE TIME REVIEW
How Does Time Management Translate Into Productivity?
This information provided by ‘Rescue Time‘ can be transformational.
It helps keep you on track to reach your goals.
You may never before have realized just how often you slip from self-imposed targets… and this helps you limit time on certain wasteful activities.
For example, you might discover that engaging on social networks or browsing news sites takes up much of your time – and doesn’t deliver proportionate results.
And ‘Rescue Time‘ will be priceless in tracking productivity, by logging the hours spent on profitable and developmental activities.
Simple and easy-to-understand ‘trend graphs‘ can help pinpoint areas of wasted time. You’ll also see how effectively you’re fixing them.
See the graph below:
I enjoy playing online chess. But hadn’t realized how addictive and wasteful of time it was.
Until I saw from my ‘Rescue Time‘ report that the “Entertainment” time category had soared… to 13.9 hours a week!
I bit the bullet.
And deleted my account at Chess.com.
Almost instantly, my “Entertainment” time expenditure dropped to 5 hours a week…
That’s an EXTRA hour and a half… EVERY DAY!
RESCUE TIME REVIEW
Your Wake-Up Call
How many hours are YOU wasting – without even realizing it?
What could you do with the time you’ll save – once you know?
As soon as this awareness hits you, sign up to the ‘Rescue Time’ PREMIUM plan
It’s just $9 a month, with a discount for pre-paying annually. The added information you’ll get from this nifty time management tool will be well worth the investment.
Even if you only save ONE HOUR daily, it’ll pay for a YEAR of Rescue Time Premium… many times over!
Rescue Time Review : Your Big Take Aways
So, here are your biggest take-aways from this analysis.
1. We all waste time – often without even noticing it.
2. Knowing where we spend time is a powerful first step in fixing this problem.
3. ‘Rescue Time‘ is a great productivity and time management tool to track your time utilization online.
Take ‘Rescue Time’ On A Free Trial
‘Rescue Time‘ is FREE to sign up and use – for as long as you like.
And play around with it for a while.
You’ll realize how powerful the information is.
And after you’re convinced about the value of this tool (maybe it’ll take a couple of months), upgrade to the PREMIUM version.
You’ll transform your productivity and boost your efficiency.
For more tips on improving your efficiency, pick up my guide “HOW TO FOCUS“. You’ll find it on Amazon.com or the ‘Heart Book Store‘.
Rescue Time Review
Your Time Audit
Okay, so with ‘Rescue Time‘ you have a way to log your time expenditure and get the data in the form of easily understood visual graphs.
The next step is to decide how effective you are.
For that, you’ll need to run a time audit.
HOW TO RUN A ‘TIME AUDIT’
Here’s how to begin…
#1: Record Time Consumption
An old expression in the field of computing is: GIGO. Garbage in, Garbage out.
To analyze anything, you first need RELIABLE data.
As you already know, ‘Rescue Time‘ runs on a computer or Smart phone, tracking all that you do on it.
The time management tool also generates diverse reports at the click of a button.
(If you use the paid Premium service, you’ll get more information. But there’s a decent Free plan you can take for a trial first.)
#2: Set Categories
You can decide how to group your time consumption.
A broad plan might be:
- Personal
- Work
Within ‘Work‘, you might have sub-categories:
- Project tasks
- Study and preparation
- Entertainment
- News
Pick whatever suits your needs best.
#3: Generate Reports
Using your time management tool ‘Rescue Time‘, generate your ‘time report’.
If you’re not keen to install an app to do this for you, you can simply keep track manually – and add up what you’ve jotted down in a diary or notebook.
You should have reliable and accurate information about how your day (or week, or month, or year) breaks up.
At first, you may be shocked to see how many hours you spend (or waste!) on each category.
And that shock leads… to your decision to change!
#4: Study Reports and Plan Changes
Simply staring at your ‘Rescue Time‘ time report won’t help.
You must study it critically – and make decisions.
- Is the time spent on a certain activity justified?
- Can it be reduced without adverse impact?
- Are there ways to bring this down?
- What else can I use the time for instead?
‘Rescue Time‘ lets you color-code specific activities and websites – BLUE for productive, RED for wasteful.
This gives you a quick visual indication, hour by hour, of whether your time is being usefully spent – or not!
That’s all it takes to run a time audit.
But what a ‘time audit‘ can give you is phenomenal.
You can take back control of your life – and skyrocket your productivity.
It all begins with your time audit. And a time management tool like ‘Rescue Time‘.
Then comes the hard part.
Making tough decisions.
And taking disciplined action upon them.
I’m (kind of) a specialist at that.
And I teach hundreds of people every year how to do this well.
If you’re keen to learn… If you’re willing to invest the time, the effort and yes, the money into this… then go here to take a look at the comprehensive ‘Transform Yourself‘ program.
It’s not free. But it is NOT expensive.
And you’ll get a high return in terms of
- time you’ll save and
- productivity gains you’ll enjoy
Make your months ahead more productive.
Run your time audit soon.
And take action.
Sign up for a free trial to “Rescue Time” here.
P.S. – The images in this Rescue Time review are screenshots of my time consumption record.
It tracks only my computer use. Other offline activities are separate.
My Rescue Time Report – Analyzed
You can see that I’ve worked 2,721 hours on my machine in 2022 – that’s an average of 7.5 hours daily.
Roughly half of that time (48%) has been productive work.
The wasteful time (coded in RED) is mainly:
- Utilities: which include FB, WhatsApp and Twitter
- Entertainment: which has movies and chess
- News & Opinion: which is mainly keeping up with world news
My decisions to boost productivity, therefore, are guided by picking the ‘lowest hanging fruit’.
- Cut out social media – completely (saves 619 hours)
- Limit chess to two 3-minute games a day (saves 65 hours)
- Reduce news consumption – to half (saves 150 hours)
It helps that my favored news portal changed owners recently, with a shift in reporting style/quality that anyway turned me off!
So IF I manage to stick to these goals, THEN I will potentially save EIGHT-HUNDRED AND THIRTY FOUR hours in 2023 alone!
😯
At a VERY conservative ‘time value‘ of $25/hour…
That’s $20,000+ in value
Just waiting to be unlocked over a year.
NOW do you begin to see the impact and value of a ‘time audit‘ – and a time management tool like ‘Rescue Time‘?
Don’t waste any more time.
Sign up for a FREE TRIAL to ‘Rescue Time’ now.