Last month I installed Rescue Time on my computer because I wanted to track exactly how I was spending my time.
Time is something that everyone has the same amount of, but it is how we use it that determines our successes or failures.
When I checked my Rescue Time reports I was spending a ridiculous amount of time on email, almost half my work day. This is somewhat expected since I work from home and many of my “meetings” and conducted via email, but half my day?
I have a lot of subscriptions that I consider necessary, but sorting through them and deleting the ones I didn’t need that day were taking up a lot of time and not converting into dollars.
My brother mentioned a service called unroll.me. I signed up immediately (it’s free) and started unsubscribing to things I didn’t want to receive and “rolled up” my other subscriptions.
I was shocked to find out that I was subscribed to almost 350 emails. I unsubscribed to 300 of them and put most of the remaining emails into a daily digest.
I pride myself in keeping a pretty empty inbox, but it was coming at a hefty price of my time.
Now instead of spending 30 minutes in the morning weeding through my inbox, I spend about 5 minutes looking through my daily digest.
I no longer spend pockets of time throughout the day deleting emails that I don’t need, and important emails are less likely to get lost in the shuffle.
I also added it to my personal inbox, which for a year has been an overflowing mess. While it can’t take care of the 8,000 emails I haven’t deleted, it will keep that number from growing exponentially each day, so maybe one day I can catch up!
Have you tried RescueTime or something similar? Has it helped?
I use Rescue Time every single day, and it has helped me tremendously. I recently installed the app on my phone, too, and let’s just say…how I spend time on my phone has been eye-opening. Changes are being made!