About a month ago was salary review time at my work, and as always this is a time of joy for those that have worked hard through the year to get a raise, and time for renascence for those who didn’t perform that well. I was between those two states which performed well but according to my supervisor I have a lot more juice to squeeze. I only needed to get more organized, prioritize and participate more. Taking those recommendations by heart I set out to start a new strategy on how to be more productive by managing the time I spend doing certain things more effectively, and how long it takes to complete them. I also wanted to allocate time for certain short term projects while leaving room for my daily help desk routine.

I needed a piece of software to help me track everything I do in my computer without me consuming too much time with it. So, I started a small research on the software to do such thing, within a few minutes I stumbled with rescuetime. Rescuetime seemed to be very simple but powerful time management software which only required a few tweaks to be up and running. I signed up for a free account and started using it. Here are some of the things I have been able to accomplish in my new strategy using rescuetime

Prioritization- this process was one of the top things I wanted to optimize in my new strategy. We already prioritize help desk work orders according to levels of importance, but I needed a piece of software to prioritize all my working time. How much time I allocate to each project and help desk

With rescuetime I am able to track the applications I use, and sites I visit on my work computer all the time. In the image below you can see the top apps and site I visited this week.

Cutting unnecessary browsing-one of my habits is to always hit the internet to research things that I don’t know or don’t understand too well, but many times I end up deviating from what I originally started for, and start browsing aimlessly. I definitely wanted to cut this completely, and stay focus at one thing at a time. Since I been using rescuetime I have been able to cut my browsing habits greatly. In the image below the yellow color on top of the graphs represent the time I browsed the Internet each day last week at work. The red represents the time I spent working on help desk applications. Unfortunately on rescuetime I cannot track the time I spend off my computer or working in troubleshooting other PCs.

Over all rescuetime has helped me staying focus on the things that are more important and things that need to be done each day. I also have reduced frustration by deadlines approaching and things not getting done. Now I know my direction and I can plan ahead with peace of mind. It has also allowed me to participate more in projects with my colleagues by knowing where I stand. There are many variables that define the effectiveness of time management, but using rescuetime is a step on the right direction.

By no means am I assuming that I have mastered the art of time management within this month; I have estimated that it will take at least a year to engrain this new strategy into my consciousness and make it part of my everyday life. For now I’m getting used to the bridle. Visit
rescuetime.com to learn more and sign up for a free account.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 5:22 am and is filed under How-To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.