What Did You Do All Day?

Ever sit down to get some work done on your site and realize that the time you gave yourself is up and you wrote one paragraph of content?

I know it's happened to me.

In fact, it's happened lots of times. I'll give myself two hours and start writing. The next thing I know, it's time to wrap up and either go to work or go to bed. What did I do that whole time?

Here's where my time goes:

1. Productive Writing
2. Research for writing
3. Creatives (pictures and formatting for my posts
4. Random things I want to change on my site (theme, plugin, consistency, comment reviews, etc)
5. Random sites of no value
6. Email
7. Facebook
8. Things I forgot to look up and I just remembered (How far is the sun again?)

Well, I had enough and decided to look for things to be more productive. I found this app that you can put on your phone and computer that tracks where your time goes.

It's called Rescue Time. It can be found at https://www.rescuetime.com

The way it works is, you download it, set it up and it just runs in the background.

When you are done being productive or want to see where your time went, go to your task bar and click on the Rescue Time icon to open it and critique your time.

It keeps you accountable and helps you identify if you wasted your time or were actually productive.

See for yourself. This is how my day looked when I set to work on my site for 2 hours in the morning before work on Monday:

I wanted to start working on an article but it turns out I only spent about 50% of my time actually writing.

I spent a lot of time researching the content as you can see in Reference and Learning and about 15% doing random communication stuff and stuff that wasn't even categorized.

When I was finished, I had about 350 words of content...not what I set out to accomplish...

You can even get a closer look by scrolling down in Rescue Time:

The top one is my domain as I was working in wordpress editor. Next I was designing images and getting photos from a stock image service I use.

You can also categorize these things individually to make sure you set them as productive or not.

Here's how my efforts went this morning:

That's a little better. I was more focused on business and only went to Reference to find exact information for my article (citations, etc).

I feel like just knowing the app is running, makes you more productive because you don't want to feel bad for getting distracted.

Did I mention the best part about the app?

Oh yeah...

ITS FREE!

There is a premium upgrade and I'm sure it's great but I haven't done it and don't intend to. The free version does what I need it to do.

Let me know if you think this would help you be productive or what you do to keep yourself accountable for time wasted!