Time management is always difficult for me.  Always has been, likely always will be.  So, out of curiosity more than a desire to cage the animal within, I signed up for RescueTime.com a while back – you just sign up for RescueTime and then run the application – every few seconds it updates the website with what you’re working on and tracks how much time you spend doing what.

Let me say that the ridiculously large “Twitter” totals and “communication” totals show what we already know – that I’m FAR too connected online and spend a lot of time networking… but I think that’s a good thing, long-run.  Also note that most of the time my computer has a twitter feed open in the foreground while music is playing in the background, and I’m doing other stuff – so that adds to the chaos.  This is broken down by Category.

By Category

Anyways, here’s a breakdown of my time from RescueTime. It takes a little customization to get the categories right – straight out of the box it may not recognize all your programs or know how you categorize the application. In other words, a lot of people think that Twitter is a waste of time, but I find it to be one of the most useful networking tools I have at my fingertips.

Overall Time Spent

Overall, even though it takes some customization to make sure that your programs are in the right category or tagged the right way, RescueTime educates you on your own time use – I didn’t realize how much time I’d spent with TweetDeck open until I saw this graph:

By Program/Website

If you’re looking for a way to see how you spend your time on your computer, give RescueTime a shot – it’s free. Hope you enjoyed knowing what specifically I do on my computer.

Now that you’ve seen what I do, let’s ask the question: “Colin, can’t you do most of that on your iPhone?” And of course the answer is, yes, I can. I don’t do anything crazy with my computer – just the basic stuff – that’s why I like my iPhone so much.

Until next time, take care.

Colin

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