rescuetimegoal and productivitygame
why I do it: To make myself do actual productive things on my computer.
how it works: Both these [beeminder] goals actually use IFTTT to add datapoints to Beeminder when I reach various different [rescuetime] goals for amounts of productive work done in various timeframes. I’m not sure why I’ve never[1] used the built in Beeminder/Rescuetime integration which I think allows you to just add time to a Beeminder goal rather than using Rescuetime’s goal system.
settings: The rescuetimegoal goal is older and can get up to two datapoints a day added to it, one for a certain amount of productive time and one for a certain amount of very productive time. The productivitygame one I set up in Jan 2020 when I was feeling I was spending too much time on my mobile devices and I tried to set it up so it gave me points for productive hours on the computer (at any time of day) but also subtracted points from me if I racked up hours on my mobile devices during my self-defined working hours.
current state: Neither goal is holding me to anything these days.
- I’ve set the rescuetime one on autodial, just as a test thing to see where the slope went. It has autodialled itself to about 6/week at the moment, which seems low for a goal that can be 2/day, but I feel I’m working pretty consistently and productively at the moment.
- The productivity game one… I still think the idea is good but RescueTime on iOS only seems to work if you check it a lot, whereas the beauty of RescueTime on the computer is that it keeps on tracking no matter what. I pretty much forgot that I had it running for over a year once and it was a delight to find the data after all that time. But the “subtract points for things you don’t want to do” doesn’t work reliably.
changes:
- I’m going to archive the productivitygame goal, it got me out of a rut when I set it up but doesn’t have ongoing usefulness.
- The rescuetimegoal one I’m going to leave for now. I like seeing the slope of the datapoints change over time. It gives me info that I don’t see directly in RescueTime. And it’s a blunt instrument that I can keep in reserve for a time when I need it, if I ratchet away the safety buffer then it’s ready to spring straight into use.
I do think that I’ve pretty much exhausted the usefulness of RescueTime, I think I’ve had it running since 2008 or so. It has trained me not to do non-productive stuff on my computer in working hours pretty well, which I think 2008ish-me would be happy with. I like seeing the trends in the data. I have a subscription that runs for another six months or more but I’m wondering if it might be time to move on.
On the whole I think more specific short term goals are better for getting me doing productive work than these goals have been. It would probably be a good idea to beemind something like giving a regular answer to the question “do you have a work thing that you are beeminding at the moment, that is actually making you do things, and if not, do you have a good reason why not?”
[1] Apparently I did use the Beeminder-RescueTime integration directly before I set these goals up. I found this in my archive:
That has hours tracked directly rather than goals reached. I think I prefer the “goals reached” metric because it encourages me to work in smaller chunks. 9 hours on one day are not equivalent to 3 days of working 3 hours. I gravitate towards the one long day but I know my work is better quality if I do the three short days.