garry’s posterous

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What a productive morning!

I recently started using this great new product called RescueTime. It's a little app I run at startup that doesn't seem to slow down my computer at all but keeps track of what I do at the computer. Later, I can tag my items.

 
Initially I was pretty resistant to the entire tagging thing-- but you know, the idea has totally grown on me. Because I tag them instead of an automated algorithm, the numbers / tags in the software mean something real to me. I know exactly what constitutes 'work' and what doesn't.
 
Here's my graph for part of today (as of 2PM or so)... already about 7 hours of work, and the day is only half done. Yes! ;-)

Comments (11)

Jun 19, 2008
Mark Rampton said...

Dude -- that's pretty awesome; i'm gonna give it a go too. It looks like you could use this to schedule needed breaks, i.e. unless time.work < total*0.8 do work else break

Jun 19, 2008
Garry Tan said...

Yeah, you can basically see hour-by-hour how you're doing against
your daily

work goals. It's suprisingly hard to break 5 or 6 hours of work in
a day,

since RescueTime filters out all the useless / wasted time.



All those business school maxims about six sigma true though -- if
you can't

measure it, you can't improve. (Business school maxims. Yuck!)

Jun 19, 2008
Roy S said...

(No knocking business school)

Do you tag things by application? Can it somehow determine that using Internet Explorer is sometimes work, but sometimes not?

Jun 19, 2008
Sanny said...

Wow, this is so cool. It's totally guilt-tripping myself into surfing less web already. (stupid thing won't count the time I spent reading new while waiting for my program to run as "work", so now I actually have to do something real to not feel guilty!)

Jun 19, 2008
Garry Tan said...

Yup, you tag things by application. It also scrapes what websites
you go to,

and has a list of most popular ones that automatically have a
categorization

which you can then tag from there.



I'm an engineer. Business school sucks! j/k... =)

Jun 19, 2008
Roy S said...

That's fine.? I'll hire you one day. ;-)

Jun 19, 2008
loc ngo said...

i'd use it but afraid to see the real stats. which usually result in 90% everything else. and 9 percent idling, 1% work.

Jun 19, 2008
loc ngo said...

ben would be 99% posterous, 1% thinking what to post next

Jun 19, 2008
Garry Tan said...

Yeah, it's kind of surprising. It ends up being < 50% of any
given day is

actual work. Though during intense sessions it can be a lot more.
For an 8

hours of real work, you really do have to put in about 16 hours. I
put in a

"work goal" of 4 hours of work per day.



I find that a >50% hour, or >50% work day tends to mean that
I really

enjoyed the day and was really really into what I was
doing...experiencing

that psychological term "flow."



Also, dude, Ben's posterous is awesome. He's our #1 featured site!
=)


href="http://coke.posterous.com">
http://coke.posterous.com for
everyone else following along.



PS, Roy, you can crunch some excel numbers for us after your MBA.
Maybe give

a few powerpoints. ;-)

Jun 19, 2008
Mark Rampton said...

I installed it at 12 and have just made it through the time sink that is "tagging". I came out at 8h 19min -- which doesn't include my 40 minute train ride and the 2 hours before install when I was working my ass off.

That's prob. the most productive day of the month for me...

Jun 23, 2008
Tony Wright said...

Why did my Google Alert fail to alert me of this post!? :-)

Glad to see ya using RescueTime. Rock on!

And grats on posterous' recent success!

-t

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