Entries Tagged 'Productivity' ↓

When planning, should we look at how much time is allotted for the day and try to fill it, or do we look at how many tasks we have planned and cap it at that?

This question was really brought home to me while I was working on the redesign of the Weekly Productivity Planner.  I brainstormed and created an interesting and useful new block to go on the planner, and while I’m not showing it yet, the basic idea is that it gives you a quick idea of how much you’ve planned for yourself for the day.

I have previously said that we need to limit the amount of things that we’re trying to do, so you would be right if you think I’d say the answer to the question is to plan to task and don’t worry about the time. I still think the best way to go is to underplan and get some peace, but…

What do you do when you finish early? Few things are as liberating as getting freebies done. By freebies, I mean the things you got done even though you didn’t plan to or have to do them. Knowing that you’ve gotten more done than you had to is very addictive and powerful, but it also causes the time creep problem.

Time Creep: that dreaded situation in which you do “just one more thing” far after you should’ve stopped working. Just one more Stumble…just one more post to read…just one more paragraph or readthrough…just one more load of laundry…

Hours of our lives are spent doing “just one more thing” when there are more valuable things to be doing. Like spending time with our friends and families…reading that book you’ve wanted to read for years…exercising…learning to play the piano…you know, living and not working.

Balancing the tension between freebies and time creep is thus a two-part exercise in discipline. The first part is learning to adequately underplan, and the second is setting a time to stop working and walk away.

I hope to provide a solution that helps make balancing this tension easier - it’s a hard lesson to learn in the abstract.

Since I’m trying to create that solution for us rather than just for me, I’m curious as to what you think: would you find it more intuitive to manage your day (or week) by time, or by task? Designing, inquiring minds need to know!

This one’s going to be a bit rough, but bear with me.

Productivity systems inevitably add something to the things you have to do or have- whether it’s learning or unlearning a new system or habit or adding an additional notebook or application, it’s going to add something.

And that fact leads many people away from taking the time to learn a productivity system. With everything else you’ve got going on, who’s got time to deal with something else?

But here’s where the counterintuitive bit comes along: sometimes adding something to your life makes things simpler, and sometimes removing something from your life makes things more complex.

Let me give the abstract example first. Look at this arrangement of dots:

Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But add four things to the arrangement, like this:

And it makes a whole lot more sense than it did without the lines. By adding something to the picture, it’s simpler.

(This diagram was not chosen randomly. Notice how the lines give structure to the dots - a good productivity, to stretch the analogy, gives a life a good structure.)

More examples:

• Think about how you would live your life without a cell phone. The removal of a cell phone, in most people’s context, makes life more complex.
• Think about how the addition of another person to your team (sometimes) makes your job simpler. If you’re the designer, poster, CPA, and secretary, it’s a welcome relief to have someone come in and do any one of those jobs well.
• Think about how outsourcing the yardwork (just to pick one) makes your life simpler, even though it adds an additional thing to manage
• The obvious addition most of us want is money. Few people refuse additional money just because it’s adding something to their lives.

The difference, of course, is between merely adding or subtracting something to the complexity of your life and adding or subtracting something that’s value added to the complexity of your life.

Which is why it doesn’t make sense to buy that second car you don’t need. Or to take that additional obligation that doesn’t advance your personal goals. Or to work more hours for money when you have reached the level of diminishing returns.

My point here: sure, learning a new productivity habit, tip, or process is going to add something else to your already long list of things to do. But if it’s good and applicable, it adds value to your life.

Conversely, adding another hack to your long list of lifehacks that aren’t making you more productive or happy is a waste of time and thus self-defeating.

A productivity system or tip should add value to your life.

Sometimes that requires the addition of habits, processes, things, information, or obligations. Sometimes it requires the removal of those things.

Learning to assess whether something will add or subtract value from your life is the first step to becoming both more productive and through-and-through happy.

The chief problem many of us face when we make our ToDo lists is that we try to list everything that we’re thinking about doing. The result is that we end up with lists that are far too long to actually complete - and, despite how much we actually got done, we focus on what we didn’t and get frustrated.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I’ve mentioned before that the trick to mastering your ToDo list involves being realistic about your list and keeping it as small as possible. Seriously reflect on your work and see how often you’ve actually accomplished more than 5 decent size tasks/projects that day. Three to five tasks/projects seems to be the sweet spot.

But it’s incredibly useful to purge all of the things that you’re thinking about just to get it off your mind. Thus the tension: if you don’t capture the things on your mind, they’ll be there harassing you. Yet if you list everything, you’ll be frustrated about not getting it all done.

The brute fact is that most of us have far more to do than we will ever have time available to do. At least, until we learn how to do less. But until we learn how to do that, our lists contain more than we’ll ever be able to do.

A tactic that I’ve been trying for the last three or four months is to indicate which of the tasks on the list are Exit Tasks. What are exit tasks, you say?

Exit tasks are those few tasks that you absolute must complete to have some modicum of peace after you’re done working. If I were being strict GTD, I’d say that they should be the only tasks on your ToDo lists - but getting there requires a lot of discipline, and sometimes it’s just more frustrating trying to figure out what to do with those tasks after you’ve culled them than it is to just keep them where they are for the day.

Why do I call them exit tasks? I got the idea from the motivation people get before it’s time for a vacation. If you’ve ever witnessed people trying to cleanly get the hell away from work before a vacation, you probably noticed that they dropped the pretenses about what all they were going to do and did the very minimum they have to to be able to take their two weeks off without a phone call.

When you’re put in that situation, you recognize how much is actually important and value-added and how much is just the mind’s reaching into the future. The point, though, is that you clean house as much as you need to, but no more.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t take the “free time” we have on a daily basis nearly as seriously, so we don’t try to compartmentalize and prepare for our free time. The result is that time not at work becomes some kind of quasi-prep time for the next day.

I got tired of my leisure time being that way, so I started being serious about the fine line between work and play. I began asking myself exactly how much I needed to do to be able to exit work and begin to play.

Hence the name “Exit Task.”

An application:

To see how this works, I’ll show you my ToDo list for the day:

• Recreate Portfolio for Client X (name of client and project removed for privacy)
• Process Guard Actions
• Answer Comments on Productive Flourishing
• Rewrite ‘About’ Page
• Write “Exit Tasks”
• Look at requirements for Adobe Creative Suites
• Fax Stuff for Angela
• Do financial review
• Look at Reviews for Adobe Products

Those were all of the things that were on my mind at the time I started purging. I didn’t try to sort them by priority or context or anything like that - it was just the unrelated brain stew of things I was thinking about doing.

Looking at the time I had available to execute these tasks, it was clear that I wasn’t going to get through them all. So the next question - which of those do I absolutely have to do to get some peace?

The first two were external requirements - so I really had to do them. The third was one that I’d put off for a few days and it was starting to bother me - so I did that one. The rest were negotiable.

So those three got an (E) put behind them - my cue that those were the Exit Tasks for the day. The rest stayed on the list, but not as things I had to do. When I was done with those three tasks, I simply reevaluated what I most felt like doing. Turns out I wanted to write this post next, but I’ll probably call it quits after this.

The main point, though, is that I could have walked away with a clear head.

What about the rest of the items I didn’t complete? They stay there and are reviewed the next day - I’ll either plan to do them, postpone them, or drop them. But I won’t forget them.

Mastering the ToDo list comes down to three things:

1. Learning to do less
2. Learning how to complete what you have to do
3. Learning how to walk away when you’ve done what you had to

The “Exit Task” paradigm has been helping me with 2 and 3.

This model works well when there’s a clear separation between what you don’t want to do (i.e. work) and what you do want to do (i.e. leisure). As I start doing more income-generating activities that I want to do or that I enjoy doing, it’s harder to find that fuzzy line precisely because the work-play dichotomy breaks down at that point.

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The short answer: For most users, Backpack is worth the time and money.

Backpack is an online service offered by 37Signals

that makes organizing your information incredibly easy. Backpack lets you make pages which can contain any combination of notes, to-dos, images, files, etc. You can keep these pages to yourself or share them with colleagues, co-workers, friends, or family.

I first used Backpack last year and, to be honest, I wasn’t impressed. 37Signals made a lot of positive changes since then and I decided to give it a try again. I’m glad I did.

I’m done with DotMac….what now?

One of the reasons that I decided to pick Backpack up again is because I decided to stop paying the Annual Apple Tax for its DotMac services. A review of DotMac is its own blog post series - and since I don’t want to reenter counseling sessions for broken promises - I’ll let it wait until then. Needless to say, I wasn’t getting enough juice for all the squeezin’ I was doing with the service.

But I was getting some functionality. What I lost when I stopped my DotMac service was the online storage for reference files and a shareable calender. I didn’t use the rest of the service, so not having some of the other features didn’t bother me.

Let me briefly touch on the online storage piece. As some of you know, I’m an officer in the Army National Guard. The Department of Defense has some fairly strict security processes in place such that you can’t plug in personal computers into their network. So, even though I kept all of my files on my personal computer, I would constantly have to shuffle them back and forth between the government issued computers and my laptop. That got annoying.

I used my online storage as a good way to still have access to those files without having to transfer from computer to computer. Furthermore, I never was in the position such that, if I forgot my laptop, I didn’t have those files.

(Note that I could have gotten around this with a mobile harddrive. I never got around to buying one because I didn’t need one as long as I had one of my online services, and they proved more functional for me.)

I would also occasionally be somewhere where I needed access to my files for the teaching and research that I do at the University. With DotMac, I had everything synced in my iDisk, so I was never without a file that I needed. I could have just gotten some online storage through another service like Mozy, but I wanted a more integrated solution.

Enter Backpack for all my file and calendar sharing needs…

Calendar sharing is also a huge feature for me. I’m horrible at telling Angela what I’m doing, even though I often put it in a calendar. My old DotMac service automatically updated her computer when I made changes - so when I no longer had that feature, there was considerable tension as my shifting schedule changed and I didn’t tell her. Having your spouse cook a meal because it’s her turn only to tell her way too late that you’re going to stay late for work causes considerable frustration.

Backpack stepped in quite nicely there, as well. Now when I update my Backpack calendar, she gets an RSS notification that I’ve done so.

But I gained more than those two features. I also really started using the Reminder feature in Backpack, as well. I schedule reminders for important things to remember, and I can set it so that it reminds both of us or one of us. For instance, she had surgery last Thursday, and the doctor informed her that was not to take anti-inflammatory meds for one week prior to her surgery. Rather than try to remember that, I just programmed a reminder that emailed us one week prior indicating that from that she wasn’t supposed to take anti-inflammatory meds during that period. Simple and efficient.

I’ve also been continually using their Pages feature in many different ways. One time I used it to keep a rolling ToDo list for things I needed to do during Annual Training. Another time I used it to keep track of the wines that we like. Another use has been as a shared project tracker. It’s really so easy and modular that you can use it for about whatever you need.

Rarely have I used a product that was so easy, and I dare say fun, that it encouraged me to use it more. Backpack does that to me on a daily basis.

Another thing about pages: each one has its own email. So you can set up a page to email all sorts of information, and Backpack diligently adds that information to the page. Combine that with the ability to easily drag the contents from one page to another, and you can hack out Backpack to be your own Capture and Process Center, GTD style.

I also have been using the Writeboard feature more and more. Writeboards are shareable documents that allow different collaborators to make changes to the document. I’ve used them to log meeting notes and to prepare agendas for teleconferences. I could see using them as a Wiki in a Small Business Structure, although it does have some limitations that wouldn’t make it ideal.

Backpack provides a cohesive, integrated solution by allowing you to share documents for collaboration.

To my pleasant surprise, 37 Signals added another feature that I’ve been wanting but haven’t asked for: The Journal. The Journal is just a place where you can write down what you’re working on so that everyone in your Backpack group knows what’s going on. I think it’ll turn out to be a more productive Twitter.

How I think it’s going to be most useful to me, though, is it’ll give me an easy way to write down what I actually did at the end of the day so that I that I don’t have to remember that I fertilized my rosebushes today - I can just search for “rose”, and as long as I put it in to Backpack, it’ll show what I did to my roses on what day. That’s friggin’ handy.

That’s great, but I’ll have to spend time and money to use Backpack…is it worth it?

Switching to any new system like this requires time. You have to learn a new way of thinking and teach yourself how to use the system. Learning Backpack, however, has been insanely easy. It’s probably taken me twenty minutes, all together, to figure out how to use it.

However, you can spend a lot of time tinkering with it to figure out new ways to use the service for your context. This feature is a double-edged sword - being able to tailor the service for your actual needs and wants also makes it so that you can spend a lot of time fidgeting with it - but I’d rather have a more modular service that does what I want it to do than one that’s constrainingly fidgetproof.

I suspect what’ll keep most people from really using Backpack is the cost. Though there is a free service available, you’re really not getting the best of Backpack - as it’s a really handy service for integrating family and group activities and information. And to do that, you have to pay a minimum of $12 per month.

However, it’s worth it for my needs, and I have been paying for the service for several months now. Consider it this way: how much of your time do you spend sharing schedules, information, messages, and trying to remember stuff? It saves me at least an hour a month - and my time is worth far more than $12 an hour. Not to mention the sanity saved from not being curtly reminded that I didn’t tell Angela what I was doing.

The way that Backpack can be tailored to an individual or groups needs is a huge feature that makes it hard for me to limit who I would recommend the service to. Backpack is so flexible and modular that it can serve the needs of anyone who needs an integrated place to share calendars, information, reminders, and (recently added) their status with others.

[Update on July 10, 2008: If you have more than 6 people that need to share information, you'll probably want to start integrating some of the features of 37Sig's other services.  At that point, it would be more cost-effective to host your own server somewhere and set-up the information exactly the way you need it. However, that would require at least one person who knew how to set up such a service, but an organization of larger than that will need some organic way to help manage information and scale that structure. More on this in the future...]

Right now, the thing that’s most likely to pull me away from using Backpack is not another online service, but rather the likelihood that I’ll be setting up my own home server. If I do that, though, it’ll be because using Backpack has shown me how having my own flexible, tailored intranet can help me and my family’s productivity.

The Changes I’d Like to See in Backpack

Despite the fact that Backpack is already a really good service, I think it could be even better with the addition of the following features:

• A daily calendar view with beginning and end times

Although the Newsroom (the dashboard where Backpack displays your latest activity and what’s coming up) does a great job of showing you the hard landscape of your day, it doesn’t have end times on the activities. For instance, I know that Angela’s physical therapy appointment is at 1pm and her allergy shot is at 3pm. What time does her physical therapy appointment end? To figure that out, I’d have to return to another source of information - which defeats the purpose of me keeping it in Backpack.

This one should be an easy one, as Backpack is already able to understand the syntax of multiple day events.

• The ability to attach notes and files to reminders

Backpack’s reminder service is really handy and easy to use, but to take it a step further, we need the ability to attach files or notes to them. Having the ability to have a reminder that tells me to call Bill at 3pm while having the agenda for the conversation included with the reminder saves me a few extra steps. Yes, this is simply the ability to time-delay an email to yourself or your group, but it’s a service that can easily be integrated into Backpack.

• Time stamps for listed items

It’s very, very easy to make lists within Backpack - so easy, in fact, you’ll probably want to start making lists of a lot of your important data. One thing a lot of people will likely try is to set up some rolling ToDo list - it works pretty well for that, especially because the list items are draggable on the page (you have to do this yourself to see how addictive it can be).

What keeps it from being the end solution for me is that it doesn’t tell me when that item was completed. For what I do, it’s important to know that I completed this portion of that project on this date rather than some other - to do that, I’d have to go back in and edit the list item to say COMPLETED ON MAY 27th. Clearly, Backpack understands timestamps, for it does it on everything else - I want it to do it on list items, as well.

• The ability to enter status for the past in Journal

Yes, this is a relatively new feature, but since I’ve been using it, I’ve been slightly frustrated that I can’t quite use it the way I want it. When you put in an item, it puts it in under today’s date - but if you did something yesterday and want to put it in that you did it yesterday, you can’t. You have to put it under today’s date. I know the Journal is designed to be used as a current status board, but being able to back enter status would be really helpful - especially if you want to capture working actions done when you’re away from the internet.

A Systematic Review of Backpack

I’d like to end this review with a more systematic summary using the criteria I set out in A Special Theory of Productivity. As a brief recap, in that post I stated that the three functions of Time Management Systems are to help us plan, execute, and evaluate our actions and that the principles of simplicity, usefulness, aesthetic pleasure, connectedness, and cohesiveness make Time Management Systems better or worse.

Backpack wins high marks in its ability to help us plan and evaluate our actions - it would be even better at it with the features requested above. Its interface is simple and aesthetically pleasing, and it’s so useful that many people will have to discipline themselves to not use Backpack to list out their lives.

Until we get a better daily picture, though, Backpack will not be an end all solution for executing one’s tasks. That being the case, it gets lower marks for connectedness and cohesiveness, since to see how those tasks are connected to anything I’ll have to refer to another system. The features requested above will help with this aspect without breaking the simplicity and usability.

Give Backpack a Try (For Free)

I encourage you to give Backpack a try if you haven’t done so already. The banner below will take you directly there so you can see the tour for yourself.  Remember that there is a free trial - if you use it and find that I’m wrong, please come back and call me out.

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UPDATE: The new design for the Weekly Productivity Planner is Out! Hooray! Pick it up here:
Weekly Productivity Planner (1347)

Sometimes the best thing to do as a designer is to recognize and admit that one of your designs is flawed. The Weekly Productivity Planner is flawed.

I’ll tell you what I was trying to do, how it passed the review process, and why it’s flawed.

All of my planners have a few common themes. The first theme is that they are driven first by your productive capacity. The basic idea here is that there are some blocks of time in which your ability to be productive is much higher than others. So I tried to capture that.

The second related theme is that productive capacity comes in more or less regular intervals. In How Heatmapping Your Productivity Makes You More Productive, I presented time as a circle. For presentation purposes, I needed to switch back to something more intuitive in the Daily Productivity Planner (DPP) and Weekly Productivity Planner (WPP). The theme is still there - it’s just presented differently.

The last theme that runs throughout the planners is that I design them based on a need. Traditional planners don’t work for me, so what I do is go back and redesign ones that do better for me and then offer them to you all. What I normally do is use the design for a little bit to work on the flaws before I put it out. While what works for me may not work for you, I know that a bad design won’t work well for anyone.

In my excitement to show the design and get it out, I didn’t use it “in the field.” Had I done so, I would’ve caught some of the glaring flaws.

What’s wrong with it, then?

1. It tries to do too much.

One of the overriding themes I’d like my planners to have is simplicity and focus. I definitely broke that in the WPP. The WPP was meant to be a weekly dashboard that allows you to focus on the things to do that week and then incorporate those things into the DPP. Instead, I ended up presenting the same information that would show up in the DPP.

In my discussion of the principles of time management systems, I wrote about the principles of simplicity and cohesiveness. In the case of the WPP, I broke simplicity for cohesiveness. Just an example of how the different principles can be in conflict with each other.

The new planner will be more focused on the weekly perspective, which means a lot of it will go. The information will be split correctly between the DPP and the Monthly Productivity Planner, which should be out in the next couple of weeks. I’ll need to design the WPP and the Monthly Productivity Planner in concert so that I get it right.

2. It doesn’t give enough space to write

In the past, I’ve measured my actual writing space requirements and used those to set the length for the blocks in the planner. I didn’t do that this time around, and ended up with a planner that you can’t write in. I jammed too much information into the WPP, which makes my spacing messed up, with the result that the blocks are to small.

Using the principles I’ve highlighted above, I broke usefulness for cohesiveness. Yet another example of the principles in conflict.

3. The Daily Heatmap is out of context

I included the heatmap on the WPP because I thought it was relevant information for the planning process. Turns out, it’s relevant for the DPP, but not for the WPP. It’ll be removed - whether I can get it in the DPP is undetermined.

What I have been considering is weekly cycles of productivity. My week goes in cycles, as well - but it’s harder to see the trends in weeks than it is to see the trends in days. Perhaps an even better reason to have an aid that helps track it, no? The trouble is to get that into an intuitive form that presents it rhythmically. But yes, I’m working on that, too.

If you’d like to speed up any of these projects, please leave a comment indicating what you’d like to see. But, for now, the Weekly Productivity Planner is banished to the Isle of Misfit Forms.

To keep track of my productivity creations (good and bad, but hopefully more good than bad), please consider subscribing to my feed. A comment or a share would be great, too. Thanks for hanging out in my virtual workshop - leave the door open behind you!

I’m going on a limb here (again) and releasing the Weekly Productivity Planner (1347) in its draft form. (Update on June 19: This planner has been redesigned. The link below will download the correct version, but I recommend you read the new post that highlights the changes to Productivity Planner series.)

Part of the reason I’ve been delaying the release of this aid is because the weekly planner is so important. Planning by weeks is just so much more effective because it allows you to capture both the big picture (what you need to do) and combine it with the little picture (the how and when you’ll do what you need to do.)

That said, a lot remained the same but was upgraded from the task level to the project level. The Projects in Focus block and Heatmap Block are the first places to start, for they just capture what you need to do and when you work well.

The Weekly Productivity Sorter functions in the same way as the productivity sorter from the Daily Productivity Planner. It’s meant to be the hub of the week - I’m torn between placing it at the top or leaving it where it is.

What I need the most feedback on is the duplication of the days of the week. The first instance of the days of the week are meant to be the more global list of things you need to do for that day. I didn’t want to derail the brainstorming and listing process by making the user decide when to do those projects at the same time they’re trying to figure out what they need to do.

This aid fits nicely with the Daily Productivity Planner (1723), and should make the daily planning go by much smoother and make the system more cohesive.

Let me know what you think, and I’ll do some more work on it Thursday. I will be completely offline tomorrow, as my lovely wife and I are celebrating our five year anniversary. Yes, folks, I’ve somehow managed to convince her that I’m not that bad after all and may be worth keeping around.

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In A Special Theory of Productivity I mentioned that I that I didn’t think RescueTime worked as a time management solution. That’s too broad and unhelpful of a statement, so I’ll spend some time reviewing RescueTime so you can see how I came to that conclusion.

What is RescueTime supposed to do?

I’ll give two explanations, one from the company site, and one from Tony Wright, co-founder of RescueTime. The company site says:

RescueTime is a web-based time-management tool that allows you to easily understand how you spend your time. One of the coolest things about RescueTime is that there is NO DATA ENTRY. You install a doohicky on your computer and we magically track all of your time usage.

Tony Wright says:

Right now, we’re (RescueTime) the time management equivalent of a cholesterol test - we can tell you you’re not quite healthy and we can let you know when you’re making progress. But we don’t have a ton to offer to get you fixed up!

(Tony: thanks for visiting and leaving the comment - I intend this to be an extended reply to you. Sorry for the delay.)

The program that is installed on your computer monitors the programs you use and updates those with an online server. You go in on your user Dashboard and tag the programs with the type of activity that you do with the reported programs. After you tag them, you’re done - from that point forward, RescueTime associates that program with that activity.

The webpages you visit are handled much the same way. For instance, if you visit this blog, you may tag it as “blog reading” and “personal development.” For the rest of the time that you run RescueTime, it’ll log time spent on this site as blog reading and personal development. I have to say…that’s pretty nifty.

So, what happens to all that information? It is compiled and beautiful graphs are outputted that shows where you’ve been spending your time (much like the one the used above-update: I tried to embed a chart from my dashboard but I kept getting 404’s from RescueTime. Will try to get that fixed, as the chart is informative). Other nifty reporting features include the ability to assign point values to activities - i.e. writing, as an academic and as a blogger, is probably the most valuable thing I do, and internet surfing one of the least valuable - so that you have beautiful charts that show you how productive you are based on the value of the activities you’ve been doing. RescueTime will also alert you when you have met goals that you have set - so, if you want to spend two hours writing a day, it will let you know via email, SMS, or RSS.

All of these features are easy to set up and work as stated. The last and probably most compelling feature of RescueTime is that it’s free! Yes, all of this time tracking and reporting goodness for free.

In conclusion, RescueTime is a free, easy to use time management system that displays beautiful reports of your activities that allow you to quickly evaluate your productivity. It simply provides the best looking graphs and charts that I have seen from any product in this niche.

So, what’s not to like about RescueTime?

You may be thinking that something’s gone awry, since I’ve both praised RescueTime and said that I don’t think it works as a time management solution. My main critique about RescueTime is regarding its usefulness and cohesiveness.

Before I begin to evaluate it, remember the framework that I’m using to do so. The functions of Time Management Systems are to help you Plan, Execute, and Evaluate your work, and the principles that make these systems better are Simplicity, Usefulness, Aesthetics, Connectedness, and Cohesiveness. (If none of this makes sense to you, read A Special Theory of Productivity for more information.)

I’ve already commented that RescueTime is simple and aesthetically very pleasing. Good work on that front, guys. But I do have some major concerns about the program…

One Tag to Rule Them All

My major concern is how useful RescueTime is. It’s often the case that there is some tension between simplicity and usefulness, and RescueTime is a brilliant case in point. A real world example is in order.

I write almost everything in Textmate. When I visit another blog and start writing a longish comment, I pop open Textmate, do the writing, and then copy back to the site. When I’m drafting blog posts, I do it in Textmate. I’m even drafting my academic papers in Textmate. That amounts to a lot of writing, and RescueTime has perfectly tracked that.

But it has tracked it as “writing.” The problem: not everything I write has the same productivity value. My academic writing has far more weight than my blog writing, though my actual habits may prove otherwise. Furthermore, RescueTime doesn’t track what I was writing, so to figure that out, I’d have to refer to some other Time Management System, which hurts it on the cohesiveness front.

I may be anal, but it’s useful to know what days and times I was working on certain projects. Knowing that helps me see trends and helps me plan future tasks. As it stands, RescueTime outputs beautiful graphs and charts that, while interesting, aren’t useful. Using RescueTime, then, is adding another layer to all of the other Time Management Systems that I currently employ…all for beautiful charts and graphs.

The Textmate example is just one of many that have the same feature. I read the same sites often times for different reasons. For example, sometimes I read Lifehack just to see what Dustin Wax is baiting me with. (Okay, he doesn’t even know I exist, but he baits me anyways.) Other times, I’m reading the site to see whether they’ve written about something I’m writing about. One of the activities involves just blog reading, whereas the other is research. Other site activities include networking and marketing.

Unfortunately, RescueTime sticks with the original way I’ve tagged it. You can go back and change your tags, but then it will stick with those tags. It can’t see the difference between reading, research, networking, and marketing. But there are very important differences between those activities that are directly related to productivity.

Of course, one option would be to use different programs for different functions. I don’t have the tagging problem with Mellel, for I only use it to polish academic papers. So, I could conceivable split tasks, but why trade using one tool (Textmate) that helps with my productivity just so I can track what I’m doing?

The Care and Feeding Of RescueTime

Directly related to the tagging problem is the fact that I’m a linkhopper. When I read blog posts, I jump to people’s blogs when they leave good comments (I’ve found some of my best blog buddies that way.) That means that when I go to my RescueTime dashboard, I have to tag all of those new sites. If you do it often enough, it’s pretty easy to do and only takes five or ten minutes. Forget to update your Dashboard, though, and you end up with a few scores of sites to tag, which takes considerably longer and is not really that accurate, since I often can’t remember what I was doing there.

I also test out a lot of different software for both personal and blogging interests. So that gives me yet another bunch of applications to tag, which leads to more productivity seepage as I’m trying to figure out what I was doing.

What I’ve found is that my options using RescueTime is either to spend 10-15 minute a day of productivity overhead tagging what I’m doing or to have a high amount of untagged activities. But, for the program to be remotely useful, you have to tag what you’re doing.

What about Off-Computer Tasks and Projects?

Another major concern I have is that RescueTime can’t (without third party solutions that marginally help) track off-computer work. Phone calls, meetings, book research, yard work, errands, etc. all are things that are productive and could bear some tracking. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get them into RescueTime’s system, so to track your real productivity, you’d have to use RescueTime plus some other solution. To be fair, the creators of RescueTime don’t claim that it can do this, so it’s not as if they’re being misleading - it is, nonetheless, a critical component of our productivity that RescueTime does not help with.

Summary Evaluation

1. Does RescueTime help you plan how to use your time?

To a very small degree, yes. I say that because if you find that how you think you’re using your time and how you’re actually using your time is quite different, you can use RescueTime to help you adjust your time. Presuming you can discern different activities by tagging them properly, which I’ve yet to really manage to do.

2. Does RescueTime help you execute your tasks?

Only to the degree that your planning subverts unproductive habits. Also note that the care and feeding of RescueTime may not be a good return on investment of time.

3. Does RescueTime help you evaluate what you’ve been doing and provide useful information for future planning and execution?

Not by itself. The system would require you to have some other system that’s tracking the tasks and projects that you’re doing in order for its information to be really useful. If you have that other system, and you’re able to sync the information that it and RescueTime are producing, RescueTime may prove to be useful as a reporting tool.

4. What is RescueTime intended to replace?

This is not really part of the framework I listed in A Special Theory of Productivity, but I take it that RescueTime is intended to replace the manual input of time a la Freshbooks. It’s a pain in the ass filling in time sheets and keeping track of where you spend your time as you’re doing it, and having a system that does this without data entry would be incredibly helpful. However, as I’ve stated above, you’re going have to track your projects and tasks some way or the other, so the only point I see of RescueTime on this front is as a reality check. But that reality check would have to extrapolate what you’re doing (i.e. tasks and projects) from how you’re doing it (i.e. the sites and applications you use).

The Way Ahead For RescueTime

I hate when people just critique a product without making suggestions. Complaining is easy…providing solutions is far harder and much more useful. RescueTime is a work in progress, and they are adding new features to it monthly. Here are some things I think would make the program better - there will be some redundancy here since my critique has already listed what I don’t like about RescueTime. (I’m shooting myself in the foot here, as some of these are what I’d do if I were currently building software, and if Tony takes the suggestions to heart and implements them, I will then be fighting him for patent uses once I generate enough revenue to get those projects going. Ah well - maybe he’ll be nice if that becomes an issue.)

1. Implement a Tagging Filter

I couldn’t think of a really catchy way to say this one. Right now, RescueTime uses the applications and sites that the user visits or uses as the filter to determine what that user was doing. Rather than doing it that way, you could allow the user to specify times that the user was doing a certain tasks.

So, for example, I could allocate the block from 0600-0900 as “Working on RescueTime Evaluation.” All of the different sites and applications that were used during that time block then provide the information of how I accomplished that task. As a project manager, I could then see that, while my employee claimed they were working on Project X, they were actually on MySpace.

I could then tag that task with different metatags that indicate what area of work it fell under. The above task would fall under Blogging, and all of the subtasks indicate the different actions required to sustain that metaproject.

2. Implement an Alert for Untagged Activities

It may be helpful to alert the user that they have a certain number (say, 10) of untagged activities that need to be tagged. That way the user can work natively without the thought of “man, I need to remember what this is and go tag it.” Perhaps a report could be emailed saying “between X and Y times you were using these untagged applications and visiting these untagged sites. What were you doing?”

3. Implement an Off-Computer Applet

This one should be fairly easy given that there are already some third party applications that allow you to have up to three offline activities. Using the ideas from the solution above would make this pretty seamless.

Different and More Positive Perspectives on RescueTime

James from Men with Pens writes:

The beauty of Rescue Time is that with least effort on my part, I have a beautiful graph of my work habits and within minutes of installation, if I feel like it. I’ll be able to see exactly where my time goes (and not where I think it goes) and I’ll see precisely how much of my time I spend on individual tasks.

If you’re into productivity, then you can’t go wrong with Rescue Time. It’s a damned nifty lifesaver - or should I say timesaver?

T.W. Garrett from TheTechBrief says:

RescueTime is set to offer a time management goal tool and the option for comparison against others in your industry for those who are serious about increasing their efficiency and finally getting a handle on their technology-driven life. I give RescueTime and A+ and I look forward to the full product release.

Scott from WebWorkerDaily says:

RescueTime is great for examining my overall productivity and helping me make sure that I am putting the proper amount of time into those areas that require my attention. I use it for big picture analysis but the tools for more detailed examinations are certainly present.

I thought it would be good to add their perspectives, since they’re a bit more positive in their reviews than I am.

If you liked this post and would like to see more reviews of Time Management Systems, please consider subscribing to my feed, commenting, or sharing it on StumbleUpon, del.i.cious, or Digg by using the handy form below. Thank you for your time and support!

I mentioned after I completed the Daily Productivity Planner that I figured out how to write this post. Life intervened and I lost the muse. I’m currently in the process of reconstructing the train of thought, but it’s going to be rather rough.

The hardest part I’m having in articulating the ideas in this post is whether I’m talking merely about software time and task management systems, or time and task management systems at large. I think that the same functions and principles are features of both software time and task management systems and of larger time and task management systems like the Seven Habits and Getting Things Done. I’ll not worry too much about it right now, but let me know whether you think I need to separate the discussion between the two.

I’m also going to conflate time management systems and task management systems and just call them Time Management Systems. Feel free to poke holes in these gaping wounds, but think more about the functions and principles, as those are the meat of this post.

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This Friday’s meditation is an original in the Taoist spirit:

Try to be everywhere, and you will find yourself nowhere.
Try to be there for everyone, and you will be there for no one.
Try to always be available, and you will never be available.
Try to work all the time, and you will not work anytime.

Build a small fire and sit close to it,
and you won’t need as much wood.

Thoughts:

This koan was inspired by correspondence I had with a friend last weekend. He’s burning himself out by trying to do too much - the success he has found exceeds his ability to keep it going. But he can’t stop feeding the fire.

I wrote yesterday that productivity is not about getting more things done, but rather about the nature of things we’re doing and how they fit into our flourishing. Sitting close to your fire and basking in its warmth is far better than doing so much scrambling to keep the fire going that you never enjoy its heat.

What’s your fire? Are you sitting close to it or struggling to keep it going?

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Photo Credit: starfires

Are you feeling down today? Want to know how to save time? He’s in a dark mood today. I’m trying to get more done.

All of the sentences above involve the use of metaphors. “The essence of metaphors,” Lakoff and Johnson argued in Metaphors We Live By, “is understanding one kind of thing in terms of another.”

(Sidebar: The Metaphors We Live By was one of the most influential books I read as an undergrad. It’s a mind-blowing read that’s well worth the time and money. Use the link above to grab yours from Amazon.)

Many of us don’t realize the power of metaphor even though our thinking is inherently metaphorical. For one thing, humans are generally very visual creatures, which is precisely why visual aids to goal setting help motivate us to actualize our goals.

But the more fundamental point about metaphors is that they have a powerful effect on our behavior. Since our behavior is partly determined by how we think about things, changing metaphors can have a powerful effect of changing behavior. Another important fact to remember is that metaphors do their work below the cognitive level - we don’t think about the associations, yet we act on those associations.

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