What Do You Do All Day?
I’m sure I’m not the only person who has got to the end of the day and wondered where the time has gone. What have I been doing all day? What have I been spending my time on? The good news is that if you use a computer, tablet, or phone for most of your day, then it’s actually not that difficult to find out.
A few years ago I came across some software called Rescuetime. You install it on your computer and it sits there invisibly in the background monitoring what you’re doing. It also categorises what you’re doing as various levels of productive/non-productive work. So for example: If I’m editing an Excel spreadsheet it knows that is productive work; But if I’m watching cat videos on YouTube it knows that is unproductive! At the end of the week it collates all this information and give you a productivity score. This is emailed to you along with some other stats. You can also drill down and see exactly how long you’ve spent using different software or websites.
That’s all well and good but these days most people use their smartphones for loads of stuff too. Although you can’t get Rescuetime on your mobile, there is a way of finding out what Apps you’re spending your time using. On an iPhone (you can also do similar within Android), if you go to “Settings”, and then “Battery” under the battery usage heading it will list the Apps you use the most with the percentage of battery they’ve taken. You can select either the last 24 hours or the last few days. By default it shows the percentage but if you hit the clock icon, it shows you how many minutes you’ve spent using an App.
*UPDATE*
You can now get Rescuetime as an App for your smartphone so can track all that in the same way as your computer :)
I’d recommend you install Rescuetime (the free version is fine btw) and take a look at the results of that, and your phone usage, after a week. It always makes for interesting and sometimes surprising reading. If you didn’t think you spent that long on Facebook and social media, you may be in for a shock ;)
Thanks
Richard
