Reclaim your time with modern tooling

Moris Zen Pasic
Jul 28, 2017 · 7 min read

As I begin the journey to launch a new project, my mind wanders off with all kinds of ideas. Before I know it, I’m feeling overwhelmed and my inner autopilot takes over. Without even thinking about it, I open up a new tab and start typing facebook.com.

Without even thinking about it, I open up a new tab and start typing facebook.com.

Procrastination can manifest itself in many ways. For me, it often comes from an impulsive tendency to do what feels easier, and not what I should be doing.

In these exciting times of modern technologies, distractions are everywhere. Although modern technology has given us so many amazing things, one of the side effects has been its ability to get in our face whether we want it or not. Creative programmers have crafted impressive algorithms to keep you on news feeds of their platform just a bit longer. These often contain some greatly timed notifications to get you coming back. The content you get is adapted to the patterns of your behaviour. Most of what you see is but based on what you’ve spent a significant amount of your time on earlier. So as soon as you start scrolling, you’re presented with content that you’ll most likely find fascinating and hopefully get glued to it.

Reclaim your time

Much of the content you view is however a filtered reality. People show off how amazing everything is, even though they might not feel so well. Authors have become skilled in getting your attention with edited pictures and dramatic headlines of a oversimplified reality. Although fascinating, this time-consuming content hardly ever provides any true value in your life. Studies show that activities on social media can trigger a high in the neurochemicals called dopamine. It’s also known as the reward molecule. So when you enter this endless stream of distorted reality, you get a temporary relief from your own reality. When something gets tough and we need to cope with anxieties of the adolescence world, this train is available around the clock to give us some numbing effects and instant gratification.

Although fascinating, this time-consuming content hardly ever provides any true value in your life.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re amazing tools to express ourselves and get connected with the world. The problem is that many of us don’t use the tools in a balanced way and they become distractions. The average office worker is distracted every few minutes and according to research from HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, it can take up to 25 minutes just to regain focus after being distracted. This imbalance can have an impact on our attention span and abilities to take actions toward long-term goals. Realising this, I started the quest to reclaim my time. I found a great deal of articles explaining how our mind is wired and mindhacks for staying focused, but I didn’t find any practical tooling to get support in the process.

Gain perspective on your spent time

I felt that time-wasting was an issue, but I wasn’t aware of how bad it was until I started measuring my activities. I knew that by the time the day was over, I didn’t get much crossed off my to-do list and was wondering where all the time went. I realised that I need to figure out where exactly I was wasting time, before I could fix the problem.

I searched around and found some amazing tools to give me an overview of my activities on my devices. Both of the alternatives that I found useful are a piece of cake to set up and they run comfortably in the background. They both have free core versions and paid subscription plans with add-ons. The free versions were good enough for me and will probably do fine for most people.

The first one is Rescuetime and is available for Mac, Windows, Linux and Android devices. Getting up and running is pretty straight forward, just press ”Get Started” and just follow the installation wizard.

Rescuetime.com

RescueTime records the amount of time that you spend on certain apps and websites. It keeps us accountable to how we spend our time and provides an interactive dashboard where we can see detailed reports and productivity scores. It intelligently filters out idle time, so that we don’t have to worry about that and emails weekly s summaries with insights. You can set a custom time if you don’t want tracking on all day, I have set it to run from Monday 6 am to Friday 5 pm. I started off by letting RescueTime run for a few days before checking my data and trying to make sense of it.

At first, I was looking for something similar on my phone. Then I realised, I almost never use my phone for productive tasks in my work. So, my goal is to limit the usage of my phone completely. For this purpose, I found a great free app called Realizd, you can download it for free on Appstore.

Realizd

Realizd (currently only available no iOS, but there are plenty of android alternatives) gives me some visually appealing insights on how many times I pick up my phone and the usage time. Both these tools give you valuable insights into your day-to-day activities. I initially guessed that I picked up my phone about 20–30 times per day. My jaw dropped when I realised that it was about x10 that amount, something’s got to change!

Set realistic goals

Both apps contain functionality to set measurable and time-related goals for certain activities. They even have alarm functionality to warn you when you’re about to break your goals. I started by setting daily goals to spend less than 30 minutes on email and less than 1 hour on social media, piece of cake I thought.

Set a new productivity goal in rescuetime

The outcome was disappointing as on most days I hit the alarm before it was noon. The goal was way too optimistic and I got frustrated when it hit the alarm so soon. I then changed the goals to something more realistic and gradually increased their ambitions with time.

Review the progress and take action

Once the tracking is in place and goals are specified, it’s time to check your activity and make sense of the data. Generally, I’ll only look at my dashboards once per week and review what could be better. The point of doing this is to make myself more aware of how I’m spending my workday. I then identified distracting activities and took actions to keep them at a minimum.

Productivity dashboard in rescuetime

Using the built-in dashboards, I noticed that I was more active on unproductive tasks during early hours of the day. As I became aware of this, I worked towards changing my habits. Instead of waking up to check twitter feeds and emails, I created some new routines. After waking up, I drank water and started meditating for 5–10 minutes. Then I immediately continued on to reading some educational articles that have been set aside before starting off my workday. As I created a habit out of this new routine, the data started changing for the better.

I noticed a relationship between notifications received on my phone and becoming active on unproductive tasks. I then tweaked my notification settings so that I don’t get notified on any clickbaits, except private messages and this made a huge impact. This past week is the first week where I’ve consequently met the first ambitious goal of being active less than 1 hour on social medias per day, hooray!

Weekly productivity goals for success

This same week has been my most productive week so far where I’ve managed to get up to 70% more tasks done.

Reward the mind for staying focused

Something that works really well for me is to schedule some activities that I love to do after borings tasks that I need to do. The trick is to only do them if the goals are reached. These activities sit and wait in the calendar and keep the motivation running during the workdays. When you manage to reclaim your time, then it’s time to reward yourself!

You didn’t fall into the temptations of false, instant gratification. You stayed committed to your goals and did what’s ”right”, as opposed to what’s easy. And you did it at a level that you haven’t been committed before, I call that some great personal development!

You can now enjoy some guilt-free time of resting and relaxing with a clear and beautiful conscience. Make sure that you don’t use unhealthy foods to reward yourself for making healthy choices, as many people tend to do. Do something that actually adds value to your life instead. By removing yourself from your day-to-day routines, you will be able to gain new perspectives and ideas.

Triggering your reward system after staying committed can do a lot help you develop a daily discipline. It’ll become easier for you meet your future goals and not fall in the same old traps.

Moris Zen Pasic

Written by

Code Monkey on a mission to simplify life.

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