Rescue Your Time

I’m pretty obsessed with time management. In the past, I’ve been guilty of letting phone calls go on too long, spending too much time editing a paragraph, or spending time looking for information, being ‘entertained’ on the Internet.  No mas.

I recently started using two pieces of software that have helped multiply my productivity. One is FREEDOM (for OS X, don’t know the PC equivalent but am sure it’s out there). FREEDOM turns off your network connection for up to eight hours. You can only get back on your network if you reboot your machine. If you suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder (and who doesn’t these days), FREEDOM will force you to focus on the task at hand.

The second is RESCUETIME, a simple application that monitors which applications you’re using and what web sites you’re visiting. RESCUETIME is simple and brilliant. It does exactly what it says. It has an intuitive dashboard that shows how efficient you’ve been (it compares you to others), gives you a snapshot of your application usage, let’s you tag your work and monitors your progress against goals you set. I’ve used both the free and paid versions of RESCUETIME and find the paid version more useful since it allows better tagging of applications and web sites. They say that “barring any other changes, measurement improves performance.” RESCUETIME definitely helps with that measurement.