What I’m learning from ‘rescuetime’ *and why I love it!
D Kai Wilson on July 30th, 2008
I started using this very cool app last night called ‘RescueTime‘. Basically, you download a little piece of software and every half an hour, it transmits the things you’ve been doing (in general terms, like the websites you visited, the software you’re using ‘etc’ back to the web, where you can categorise, align, and generally spend time seeing when you…spend time.
After I got over the privacy issues (cause, it’s watching me!) and the fact that tagging takes 10 minutes out of every three hours or so (though I’m thinking that’ll be a transient thing cause there’s only so much I need to tag and the rest can go in ‘NOS’) and so far, I’ve learned that I spend WAAAAY too much time in my email. We’re looking at an hour already today because I just wasn’t disciplined enough to say ‘all right, lets close this sucker’. Part of it is that my todo/task list is in there too, but mostly, I’m just hugely undisciplined when it comes to my email.
And then I procrastinated some more and spent thirty minutes cleaning stuff that, in reality, didn’t need cleaned. I’m weak, really.
I’ve set myself a goal of two hours of writing a day - less than two hours in email, one hour of ‘professional’ blogging, and the rest for client/server work, so I’ll have to see how that goes.
Writing is going painfully slowly. Thanks to the people that have offered or expounded on thoughts - it has put everything on my todo list back (including installing and designing themes for freinds/blogs), but I’m slowly, but surely, getting there. one of you suggested that I’m on overload at the moment, because it’s been, effectively, two years since I had any meaningful time away from the kids, when before I had whole weekends, and that my brain is just having problems adjusting, and I tend to agree. I’ve been ‘forcing’ normality, because my newer set of freinds really don’t understand bipolars, and it’s painfully obvious when I say something that others recognise as a red flag and they just continue on thier way, and it’s hard work. I don’t like ‘normal’, even if it is just a setting on a washing machine. Between that, and Uni, and dealing with a couple of things that are lingering from the end of last year (I wish they’d just go away, already!)I’m completely, and utterly, knackered. I need headspace. I get it at the end of this week, hopefully.
I’m also still trying to decide if I really need to install a daily/weekly/monthly/project based wordcount. The question I’m currently asking myself is ‘who cares enough to watch that’. I guess it would answer questions like ‘when are you doing more celestaine’, and would, in the end, be a great fan selling point (she’s 3/4s of the way through the book….wooot!) but for the moment, I’m not sure anyone would want to see what I’m working on and where it’s going. I might be wrong. It’s probably worthwhile, if only so when I’m really down, I’ve got an archive of what I actually managed. RescueTime helps with that too.
(Disclosure - Rescuetime is free if you’re not using it in a group setting, it doesn’t have an affiliate link, and most importantly of all, though it can ’see’ what you’re doing, it can’t SEE what you’re doing. It can tell what you’re using, on the surface, but not what you’re using it for in other words. And you can tell it not to track certain things too).
