If you feel you aren’t as productive as you want or spend time online only to wonder where it went and why you are far behind, grab a copy of RescueTime. This productivity app tracks what you do and where you go online. With a free copy as well as a low-cost premium option, this application has options for everyone.
RescueTime Free vs Premium
The free version certainly provides enough to help you better understand where you are spending your time online to start taking control of your time. For more detailed reports and the ability to enter and track offline activity, you’ll need to upgrade to premium.
The free features include:
- automatic time tracking
- reports
- track goals
Premium adds the ability to
- track offline meetings and non-web document editing
- block distractions
- daily highlights
- real time alerts
- and more…
Pricing for premium is $12.00/month per user or $78.00/year per user.
Learn more at https://www.rescuetime.com/why_premium
Transcript of Introduction to RescueTime.com
(00:01):
Hey everybody. It’s Kim Shivler and I have a confession. Sometimes my productivity is not what I want it to be. So when we talk about Clifton Strengths, one of my top strengths is focus and focus means that I can hone in on something and focus on it and not even see anything else around me when I’m focused on my deadline for the day. That can be a really good thing. But when I start the day, maybe off track a little bit, or I just let myself open up that video game for a few minutes or go down a rat hole with maybe some email I don’t need to do, obviously as business people, there are times that email might be really important, but sometimes it’s just kind of getting in there and, and playing or reading things that aren’t relevant to what I need to be doing right now.
(01:05):
RescueTime Helps You Be More Productive by Showing You Where You’re Spending Time Online
So I am going to share with you today. One of my favorite tools, it’s called RescueTime. And today I’m going to be showing you the free version. I’m actually going to go back to upgrading to the pro version. I used to have the free version, and then I had the pro and the big difference is the pro version actually lets you enter and track times when you’re not on screen time when you’re actually out at a meeting. So right now, when we look at my productivity, it will have large blocks that show as not productive, but those could be a times when I’m on a coaching call with a client, uh, they could actually be super productive, maybe even moneymaking. So I am going to be showing you today, the free, the free version. And I will circle back around and show you the pro version once I upgrade. And then we can look at some of the differences. The free version is a great way to just get started tracking yourself and seeing where are you really spending your time online?
(02:14):
I’ll be back in a minute. So we’re going to look at RescueTime and I’m here in my Google Chrome. There is a Chrome extension. I’m actually going to launch the full app. I keep this running on my computer and it actually launches when I reboot so that it tracks what I’m doing. I’m going to go ahead and look at my dashboard and see, Whoa. So I have 55 minutes logged and some of it’s really not productive. So I need to go in and look at that. And I said earlier that this is the free version. So the hard part here is I can’t, I’m not on premium. If I was on premium, I could track the fact that I’ve had two hours’ worth of outside, very productive work, but I can’t track it here. This is just for my screen time. And yet that’s still pretty good.
(03:14):
RescueTime Charts Use the Color Blue to Designate Very Productive Time
So what we’re seeing here is my blues are my very productive time. Uh, my design and composition I was working on. You can see a video as well as my program site, which is where people purchase things from me. I’m going to come back to entertainment in a minute. Not sure what that is, communication. And scheduling’s giving me a gray. Now the thing is that. So what is this showing me? First of all, KimShivler.com. That is my main site. And I was actually doing web updates. That should be highly productive. Same with Gmail. I don’t use Gmail to goof around and I check it during the day just to work with customers. And actually, I spent some time this morning just sending out one, two, three, four, five, six, seven emails to clients that were important. And I have two more to send later. So we want to make sure that we are going to fix that. If I click here on the Gmail, right? And I can now edit that activity. And instead of being neutral, I’m making it productive because it’s actually productive for me. Again, if you are goofing off an email or goofing off in social media, then you don’t want to change that. You would want to say, Whoa, maybe I’m spending time. I shouldn’t, but in my case, it is productive. I’m going to go back and look at my dashboard. Now I have more productivity. All right, what is my next set of neutral? Let’s go look at it.
(05:09):
Okay. KimShivler.com. Again, this is very productive. We want to edit this activity because this was me. Actually, this should be design and composition.
(05:22):
Yeah.
(05:23):
Sometimes Items Marked as Neutral or Unproductive are Actually Very Productive – You Can Change the Charts to Reflect This
Hmm. Let me select that. And this is, Oh, excuse me. This is my I’m just going to put general and that’s very productive time. So now we can see that that becomes very productive because that was, again, me keeping my website updated, which is important for my clients. It’s important for security. It’s important for a lot of things. Now let’s go back and look at that dashboard again. Now the key is here. Don’t goof around truly, if, be honest with yourself, if you’re playing on Facebook or playing candy crush or something like that, you want to show it as distracting so that you get a good picture of what you’re actually doing now. Okay. So here’s a problem. This says entertainment and it’s photo booth. Well, the challenge is click on it here.
(06:25):
When Using Photo Booth to Shoot Content Videos, I Mark It Highly Productive
Photo booth is where I actually shot two of my videos that I’m creating for you today and I’m posting. So that’s actually really productive time that needs to be we’ll click on edit activity. This is not entertainment, and I can see how it would be. This is actually, it’s actually video shooting, not video editing, but we’ll go ahead and put it under video editing for now. And I may need to just add another setting in there as you probably just make it all video production. Some of it’s editing, some of it’s shooting. We’ll just going to change that. But now we can look at, if I look at my dashboard, right? I only have an hour, not quite an hour, logged 55 minutes. My productivity is good though, but I have a couple hours here that I wasn’t able to log. Now, of course I can actually keep this in my head and, or on a separate sheet, but I’m going to go ahead and upgrade. I don’t think it costs very much. And right now there’s a, um, a sale on, and I think I’m going to go ahead and upgrade and I’ll come back to you guys later, maybe in the next couple of days, and to show you some more reports as well as what it looked like when I was able to upgrade.
(07:52):
Thanks for joining me. I’ll keep bringing you more productivity tools. I’m Kim Shivler back to my face time and I’ll see you soon. Bye. I hope you found that helpful. I hope you’ll check out rescue time, rescue time.com and grab your own free option to see what’s going on with your productivity. And if you find something interesting, as far as maybe you were spending time, somewhere that you weren’t even aware of, drop me a line and let me know. I promise I will not call you out on air I’m Kim Shivler. I’ll see you next time. Bye.