During my dayjob my boss recommended an awesome application called RescueTime. Basically it is a simple app residing in the system tray that monitors what you do all the time. It periodically sends this data to the RescueTime server, and by logging on to your account you can view how productive or unproductive you were. I think this is one of the best productivity measurement apps I’ve ever seen, warranting it a bit more in-depth look on my part.

Setting up RescueTime

Setup is really easy, all you need to do is go to the RescueTime homepage and register for a free account. Once done, download the desktop application and install it (currently available for Windows and Mac). When you run the application it will reside in the system tray, right-click it and open the preferences. On the basic tab you can enter your registration details so the app knows where to send the data, and you can also set it to go to your dashboard with a double-click, I have this enabled.

On the advanced tab you can set the scanning interval of the application. I recommend you set this to a very low level, around 1-5 seconds. If you change windows very few times you can set it to a higher value, but it may lower the effectiveness of the logging. You can also set the time intervals between updates sent to the web. If you want to review your tasks every night I suggest setting it to around 15 hours, but you can also update manually using the button. I have it set to 5 minutes right now because I like my stats all nice and fresh, and I am also still in the process of setting things up.

In the privacy tab you can restrict your browser logging activity a bit, since RescueTime not only records that you are using your browser, but also the site you are looking at. You can create a whitelist by adding some entries, this will result in the app logging only those sites by name, others will be logged as “Other Websites”. You can also record only partial URL’s like “google.com” instead of “google.com/reader”, but both these options lower the effectiveness of the logging process, the fuller you record what you do the larger boost in productivity you could get with the app.

Using RescueTime

Now that we’ve got everything up and running its time to actually start using RescueTime. All you really need is to start working normally, the app will record what you do, and for how long. After you finish a few hours of work though, I suggest going to the dashboard and taking a look at some stats. Since you don’t have any tags yet, let’s make some, this will give you a lot of flexibility in monitoring your productivity.

Click on the Apps/Site List on the right and you will see a list of all the apps you have used. You will see that apart from Windows or Mac programs, you will also be presented with specific web pages you visited. You can click on Tag it! to add tags to each application. Once you add some, you will be able to view graphs on time spent on each tag and so on, which is very powerful on its own, but add tag rating to this and you really do have a productivity monitoring powerhouse.

If you click on all tags you will be able to rate each tag from -2 to +2 and based on this, RescueTime will calculate some valuable info for you. Once you are done, go to the dashboard and you will see some more stats now. You will see your efficiency level (time spent on productive activity vs distracting activity) and your productivity (compared to the RescueTime user base) level. I would mainly concentrate on the efficiency level, but trying to increase productivity could be a fun activity, and of course it forces you to be highly productive. You can also see various informative graphs about your top tags, top applications (time-wise) and total time spent.

Setting Goals and using RescueTime productively

Setting goals is a great help if you want to spend more time on a specific activity. Click on Goals and Alerts in the right sidebar and you will be able to add some specific goals in the form of “I want to spend 3 hours a day on blogging” for example. This info will be shown on the dashboard and you will see how you are doing. As all visual representations of data, it will be immensely helpful in bettering your performance.

The way to use RescueTime productively is to let it monitor you all the time. I found myself switching it off for 5 minutes, since setting up Netvibes for my girlfriend isn’t a normal activity in my day. I realized though that it is still an activity and should be logged, since in the long run, after thousands of hours it won’t make a difference too much and if it does, I won’t notice it if I always switch logging off.

Another way to use the app to maximize your productivity is to use the time views available. By analyzing your day to day performance, weekly performance, monthly performance and eventually yearly performance, you will be able to identify “trends” in your working method, and hopefully you will be able to extend high points in the graph and eliminate low points.

My RescueTime verdict

This application is the one I am most excited about and I will be covering it more in the future. The reason I love it so much is that after 20 minutes of setting up it will monitor your performance automatically, no need to constantly update, add tasks and so on. The beauty of it is that if you spend some extra time on it you will get 500 times the invested time back, but if you spend no extra time at all, you still benefit a lot.

If you blog a lot, especially if you do it professionally, a lot of your day will be spent writing and reading stories. An RSS feed is an integral part of this, both for finding stuff to write about and also to keep yourself up to date on news. I think Google Reader is an excellent tool to manage 90% of your workflow in terms of writing and reading, it ads a great deal to my productivity at least.

I used to send myself the stories I wanted to read or work on through Google Reader (take a look at the post here), but since I’ve switched to a tag and folder based approach. Here’s how I manage my blog workflow in 5 steps to maximize my productivity.

1. Organize your feeds by importance

Instead of organizing my feeds by category it is more effective from an organization point of view to doing this by importance. This is helpful because I may have 1000+ unread items from some news feeds, which is not a big deal, but just one post missed from a site like the official Google blog will make me quite unhappy indeed. Therefore to stop interesting, albeit less important news items clogging me up, I create three folders, “Important”, “To Watch”, “Other”. My important folder contains product blogs, like the Remember the Milk blog, or the Official Gmail Blog so I can get the latest development news quickly. It also contains some top blogs like Lifehacker. The “To Watch” folder contains other blogs which also have cool stories, but if I miss out on one, or read it a day later the world doesn’t collapse. “Other” contains general news blogs I read or fun stuff, like the Beaver and Steve RSS feed.

2. Create categories for your workflow

One feature that Google Reader introduced not long ago helped a lot in my productivity and is party the reason for making the change from email to a wholly Reader based solution. Apart from folders, you can now tag posts, and even view them later on as part of that tag. I have three types of tags, I call them resource tags, info tags and archive tags.

Info tags are tags which I add to regularly, but I also remove items every day. They could be compared to to-do lists because all items represent something to do. A tag like this would be my “To Read” tag. All posts go in here which I will not write about, but I want to read because it contains some info, usually regarding my blog, or blogging. Once I have read the item I will delete it from this tag and either remove it completely from Google Reader, or move it to an archive tag.

Resource tags contain items which have resource lists in them. A post about the top 10 to do lists on the net would be put in here for example. I will not cover this post as is, but it provides a list of services which I might want to cover. Resource articles don’t stay around forever either. I usually review items in this tag once a week and if I find services I like I record which ones they are somewhere and I delete the item.

Archive tags just serve to contain material which I delete from other tags. Posts which provided me with valuable info might be put here just in case I need to reference them again, you never know. I rarely delete something from an archive tag, but it may be a good idea to go through it every 3-4 months and clear it up a bit.

In reality I actually use three tags “Resource List”, “To Read” and “Archive”, these correspond to my three categories, but the reason I always talked about categories is that you can have more than one info tag, depending on the field you work in and the type of blog you write.

3. Record your ideas

Recording your ideas is very important, especially for me because I just have so many. About 50% of these turn out to be not so great, but since I take them all down, I’m left with the other 50% that is good. I use drafts to record everything, and by draft a simple title will do to quickly jot down a thought. I use Windows Live Writer to manage all the ideas and posts because I can write as many drafts as I want, going through them one by one, and once done publish them from right there.

I transfer all story ideas that come from my RSS feed to Live Writer as well as stuff that just pops up during the day. About 90% of the time I just come up with a quick title and put the source of the story (if any) in the body, and perhaps a few notes and pointers so I don’t forget. This way Writer works sort of like an ideas repository for me.

4. Create daily routines

I say routines because I don’t like it if my whole day is governed by one task list our one routine. I have 4-5 things I do each day and the reason I separated them is that if I skip one the system doesn’t fall apart. One of my favorite routines is the RSS scanning every morning. Basically I get up at around 6am and go through all my RSS items.

On my first go I star all items of interest, regardless of what category they will fall into. I then fire up Live Writer and transfer all stories I will write by creating a new post, coming up with the title and opening the link to the site of the item, copying the link into the body of the draft. I take down any additional notes I have, but I do not spend more than 30 seconds on one single post. I un-star all items that I have transferred, so I am left with only 3-4 starred ones which I will now review again.

On the second pass I decide what to do with the remaining items. I either send them to an info tag, for reading later, or send them to the resource list for future reference. More often than not, I also immediately delete some items because I realize I will not really need them anymore, you’d be surprised at the difference 5 minutes of settling in makes to your views on one piece of info.

While making two passes is a bit redundant, I find that it increases my productivity overall. I may read an item twice, but the organization and clarity of mind I gain makes the extra spent time quite worth it.

5. Set up fix review times

As I have already mentioned, it is important to set up some review times, just like you would in GTD. I review info tags daily (and weekly) and my resource tags weekly. I review info tags daily from the perspective of reading some, and every Friday I review them to purge the list, delete items I won’t really read. My resource tags get reviewed weekly for the same reason. I either take down some items from a resource list or I just delete it.

You also need to review your drafts often, since you may find that a story has been sitting on your “desk” unwritten for ages. I review my draft list just like my info tags, once a day to get a glimpse of what I need to write or what I missed out on, and weekly to purge the list and delete drafts that don’t seem like great ideas anymore.

About once a month I review my whole system as is. I take a look at the tags I’m using, my feed reading activity and so on. I remove feeds I don’t really read, or that I don’t find too interesting, I add tags and delete them if necessary (I advise as little change here as possible) and make tweaks and changes where needed.

The idea is to keep your system as static as possible, while making it flexible enough to make changes if needed. Ideally you should find things to tweak all the time, find new tools and so on, but your core system should stay in tact.

In Windows Vista and Xp I love the way the user accounts are handled with music, documents, pics all available in an easily understandable structure. However, I find that data and disk management wise it is much better to have all these on either a separate drive, or a separate partition.

You can change the default location of user folders which means that the data in them will be accessible through the original location, but also in a new location you specify. The data will actually be stored in a new location, the old location will serve as a short cut to them.

In Vista, all you need to do is right-click the Documents folder for example and choose properties. Click on the location tab on the top left and using the move button, select a new location for your files. Click yes to move all your files to the new location and from then on, whenever you click on Documents in the start menu, or choose it from a save dialog you will actually be going to the new location. In XP the method is pretty much the same, except for maybe a button difference in the end, I can’t remember, but you should be able to get along fine.

Using this method you can backup your data much more easily, especially if you choose a location on a different hard drive. In this case you can just reinstall windows keeping your folder structures in tact easily.

I used to find myself so many times in situations where I needed to do a lot of work, but actually didn’t do anything because sorting out the initial chaos seemed so impossibly that I just pushed the whole load in front of me. Doing some scheduling works wonders if you have similar problems, just writing it down will clear you head and you will know what to do and when.

Keep in mind that the approach below works best when you need to sort out a lot of stuff in a short time, but I am finding it increasingly useful for my day to day stuff too. I use a 3 step process here’s how.

I create two lists and one table at the end. You could merge all these into just one table, but I find that having them separately helps, so you can view your tasks in context. As my first step, I jot down the projects I need to work on, usually in order of priority.

1. Write blog(s)
2. Create my main personal site
3. Record CD

After I’m done, I write down the sub-steps that need to be taken for each project. I try to get medium detail here, I don’t want to be to anal about it, this is just scheduling, not breaking down stuff into actions, like in GTD. For some reason I find it useful to group these by project, but not actually write down the project name. I think I like it more because the project names are five lines above and it just makes redundant information.

• Daily Hack Your Day Post
• Daily gHacks Post
• Make Use Of post twice a week
• Create a site template
• Install content management system
• Create all the content
• Record guitar tracks
• Sing the song
• Mix the songs
• Create album art

Now that I can see all my items, I create a table with the following properties. The first column contains the day of the week and the date. The next column contains the deadlines and the following ones the tasks. I also have some rules set up for my task columns. For example, I only allow myself two tasks a day (apart from blogging). This is most useful when you have many projects, you can restrict yourself to 2-3 for example. You can take a look at the table I made in the picture, it contains all the tasks and projects.

The reason I allow only 2 tasks per day is that this is for emergency work, when I need to go through things fast. I can’t have my mind wandering everywhere, I need to keep focused. I would limit it to 4-5 in a normal schedule and the table would probably be more elaborate.

I think you need to spend about 30 minutes on a fairly complicated table, but the clarity of thought and productivity it can give you will be worth it. You can also tweak and tune it any which way you like, I prefer to keep it as simple as possible.

Here are some of the links I liked today, from hard drive problem anticipation, to advanced Thunderbird, you are bound to find something to make you a bit more productive, happy reading!

Don’t forget, if you have any link suggestions for me you can send them directly by email, or add it to your del.icio.us account and label it with “for:danielpataki” and it will show up in my account as well.

How to tell when your hard drive is going to fail - Lifehacker
Four ways to run webapps from your desktop - Make Use Of
Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Screenshot tour - Lifehacker
Quickly resize Photos in Vista - Sizlopedia
Five advanced Thunderbird tips - gHacks

Tomboy is a very simple application for Linux in principal, but its uses are extensive and you can build a note taking system as simply, as elaborately and as productively as you want. The basics of Tomboy is that it uses a Wiki like linking strategy, where specific words can be links.

For example, start a new note and name it To-do. From then on, this becomes a link, if you write To-do in any other note it will become a clickable link that takes you to this note. This means easy navigation throughout the notes, and together with the powerful search feature you can reach anything in seconds.

Getting Tomboy

If you have Ubuntu it will be installed automatically and you will be able to find it under Applications - Accessories. The repositories are not yet updated, so this will only be version 8.0, as opposed to the newest, 10.0 version. The newer version enables Notebooks, in other words folders for your notes. Check out the Tomboy website for the new version.

Using Tomboy

I think I pretty much covered how Tomboy works, simply name a note, start writing, and from then on, the note title becomes a link. Let’s focus on how to use this application productively. First of all, I was very nervous about using any apps like this because I am afraid of loosing the context of true folders. In reality though, search functions are so good nowadays that adding many folders just makes you loose focus, instead of gaining it.

Managing contact interaction

I think the best way to use Tomboy is to have an aggregation page for your notes, and having separate notes under it. A good example of this is the way I manage contact interaction now with Tomboy. I have a Notebook called “Hack Your Day” where I store my main notes. These are To-Do lists, and my contact list. I also have a Notebook called “Hack Your Day contacts” which contains all my contacts as notes.

The contact notes are all named with the full names of my contacts an underneath I Basically write a log of events so I know who’s who, and how I interacted with these people. I simply use the format “Date - Event”.

In the main contact note I simply have a list of all the people I have on my contact list. This enables me to take a look at people at a glance, or to write very short notes, categorizing people. The possibilities are quite endless, and while this system is extremely powerful, it is also extremely simple, yet productive.

Managing Ideas

When managing my ideas I use the WikiWord feature of Tomboy. This enables organization, without the need to create notes for each idea at the start. I have a note named Ideas in my Hack Your Day folder and it contains a very basic list of my ideas. The ideas desciptions are usually pretty short, but for each one I create a description under 6 words.

If I work on an idea immediately, the short description would be “Tomboy Review” for example, if I want to jot down my ideas on this post. If I want to create the post at a later time, but I don’t want to forget the idea, I would use a Wiki word and would name the idea “TomboyReview”. This would underline the word, but not create the note. Once you click on the Wiki word the note is created.

The great feature of Wiki words is that it declutters your interface of empty notes. the other feature I love is that if you rename the note, all links will be updated. I don’t really like to write in Wiki word format, so once I am ready to create the idea, I can simply rename the note to “Tomboy Review” and the note will also be updated, but the link from the ideas note will also become “Tomboy Review” instead of “TomboyReview”.

Searching and organization

Organizing your notes is quite easy. You can create notebooks as folders and that’s really all you need. Apart from this, a feature I use a lot is the pin feature on the desktop. Tomboy resides in the tray and left-clicking on it will let you see the newest notes, create notes, search and list notebooks. If you click the little pins next to notes you can pin these to the list, these will always be visible, regardless of the time of creation.

When viewing any note, you can also click on tools to see what note links to the one you are viewing. This is both handy for quick navigation, and for viewing inter-note relationships.

Integration and export

If you like to view notes a bit differently, or if you would like to quickly share them with even non-Linux users, you can export your notes to a html format. This can help your productivity, since you can print some to-do notes for when you’re not around your PC, but you can email the html file, or even put it online with some formatting. Simply go to tools and export to html.

Links inside the note are also listed when exporting to html, so this opens up a new world of possibilities. If I were to print my main to-do note, I would not only see the simple list of my to-do’s, but underneath, all linked notes will also be displayed, giving me a detailed list.

The html template used is pretty simple, so if you have very basic hmtl and css skills you will be able to create a template for yourself, publishing your notes in any way you want, but in reality the default simple format is fine.

If you use Evolution for your emails, you can use Tomboy to keep track of your emails by simply draggig an email onto Tomboy. This will create a new note with the subject as the note name. I find this feature handy, but quite useless for me. Evolution is there to manage your emails and does a really good job of it too, so there is really no need to use Tomboy for this (although it’s feasible of course).

Plugins

Tomboy can be enhanced by plugins, but it already contains most of what you need, and other plugins are rare. Export to html and evolution integration are both add-ins, there are only 1-2 more you can use. If you have some programming knowledge you can of course write your own, it’s on my to do list to learn some C programming for this purpose.

One great extension I found was TasksList, but I couldn’t get it to work. This plugin cab pull specific notes together, creating notes automatically. For example, I would not need a master contact list, I could format each contacts name with [contact], and all the people would be pulled together into a separate list.

I compiled the plugin myself (Im very proud of this since the code wasn’t correct), but sadly I only found the 0.2 source, while the screenshots shot TasksList at 0.7.1. The plugin dll itself can’t be used because the newer Tomboy versions changed their plugin management. If anyone knows a solution, please let me know.

Overview

My verdict is that Tomboy is THE best productivity and organization application I have seen. This means that it has the best simplicity, usability productivity and organization values overall. Onenote may offer more features for example, but it is much more complucated.

Tomboy allows you to focus on your tasks and what you are doing, as opposed to the organization and beautification of notes. It is a great example of why I’m starting to say Linux is better than Windows. This is a free application for a free OS and its better than any paid utility I’ve tried. In addition you can alter it, write your own plugins to suit it to all your needs.

Weather you need contact management, project management, an ideas repository Tomboy can help you do it productively, after about 5 minutes of planning. A great app to use, please try it, even if you use Windows you can use a live CD to try Linux from a CD, Tomboy will be available on an Ubuntu Live CD right away.