Working from home has a serious drawback – nobody is really monitoring what you have been doing during a work day. There are no managers or project leaders or even colleagues around you. With this kind of setup, one can easily fall prey to the age old problem of wasting one’s time. It can be watching Youtube videos in the picture-in-picture mode, reading the latest celebrity news or trying to do grocery shopping online. Social networking surely does not make things better for home workers.
In order to make sure you are not wasting your time especially when a project’s deadline is right around the corner, you can seek help from RescueTime. As its title suggests, it can rescue your time and keeps you alert of any time wasters. It can be installed on your PC or Mac, but is also available as a web browser extension. In the latter case, it monitors your activities only within a web browser. The PC/Mac version gives a much better coverage of all of your computer activities.
Once installed, it monitors how much time you are spending on which website or application. It updates the report every few minutes. At the end of the day, you can see how much time was spent on actual work and how much time was spent on non-work related activities.
When installed in a web browser, it displays not only how much time you have spent on a particular website, but also how much distracting a website is. If a website is too much distracting, then you should stay away from visiting it at work hours. The reason is very simple – it will display captivating content that very few of us can resists. And before you realize you would have the entire day glued to your screen on that website only to be interrupted when your boss asks you for the status update on the latest project.
RescueTime is available for smartphones, for web browsers and also for desktop computers. Its lite version is free for use albeit feature limited. It can help you overcome your daily distractions and improve your work performance.
You can get the RescueTime extension or app from https://www.rescuetime.com/.