Rescuetime focus time7/24/2023 Then, RescueTime asks me what I’m working on during this session. As the narrator says, “you are coming to this session as you are now. Every time it asks me this, I surprise myself with how my answer colors my expectations. It asks me to check in with myself and rate how I’m feeling at the moment. RescueTime prompts me to clear all of that away, or deal with them before getting to work. The YouTube videos I had open last night calling to me. Mess on the corner of my desk catching my eye. These two broad concepts–the environment and the body–include most everything I can imagine taking me off track during the course of a focus journey. I can choose to prep my environment, my body, or both. The RescueTime Assistant now offers a helpful narration that walks you through a warm-up for your work in real time. I click “start a focus session,” and I’m offered a few options to choose from. But I also try to add a Focus Session early in the day, at 9am. I like that– plenty of buffer on either end. Today I have meetings at 11am and 4pm, so RescueTime lets me know I’m in a Focus Zone at 2pm. Just do your best to get through it.” But if there’s nothing on my docket, it pushes me to do some deep work, and suggests the best times for a Focus Session. If it’s chock full of meetings, it’ll tell me something like “this is a full day. RescueTime integrates with my calendar to see how “heavy” of a day it is. So every morning, The Assistant gives me a forecast that gives me an idea of my capacity that day. And if I have a bunch of meetings scheduled, forget it. If I’m doing tasks that require switching between applications and brainspaces, it’s not the most conducive time to concentrate on one solitary task. (You can complete a session in fifteen minutes, but its true power is really felt in longer timespans.) To help me achieve this, RescueTime offers something called a “Focus Session” –a tool that prepares the most vital elements of my mindset and workspace to prime me for a productive session of work, and then guards me from distraction and temptation the whole time I’m working.Ī Focus Session is an intentional act, and one that takes a little bit of apparatus and time. The RescueTime Assistant greets me with a “Good morning!” and a goal for the day: spend at least three hours doing “Focus Work,” my important work that needs to be free from frenetic multi-tasking or distraction. I sit down at my computer, and the first thing I do is click the RescueTime icon. I’ve blocked off 8am to 6pm as my workday. I’ve already exercised, showered, and eaten breakfast. I’m getting ready for my first work session of the day. ![]() Here’s a day in my life and work with the RescueTime Assistant at my side: Starting off It has legitimately changed the way I work and raised the level of productivity I’m able to consistently reach. ![]() I already run RescueTime in the background on my computer at all times so it can record my activity throughout the day–which apps I use, and how much time I spend on each one.īut my favorite new feature is the Focus Session. But to do my best work and access my creativity, my focus needs to be singular and uninterrupted. With this wide variety of tasks comes a lot of flitting between apps, and opportunities for my attention to be stolen. I write articles and copy for various publications, edit videos and short films, and do various administrative and spreadsheet-adjacent productivity work in intervals. And if I’m working on my computer, I do it with RescueTime. Almost every day I try to do the same thing with my work.
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