Hi Friend,

I apologise for my absence over the weekend. It seems that the stress of last week caught up with me and I kinda crashed. I did however get to see the new Bond film - Skyfall. What a great movie! Not just a great Bond movie, but a great movie in its own right! :)

Sadly, I missed about 15 minutes of the plot due to a lack of concentration caused by an "incident" in the cinema. Let's just say that said incident involved a child and a rather unpleasant smell for the remainder of the movie...

Moving on swiftly, it's Bonfire Night in the UK today and as I sit writing this I can hear fireworks exploding. I am tempted to go upstairs to watch, but I will be good and keep working...

Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes night is a tradition in which we Britons celebrate the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, where a group of men, led by Guy Fawkes, attempted to blow up the houses of parliament. So on Novermber 5th every year, we burn effigies of Guy Fawkes on bonfires and set off fireworks in commemoration of the day. Weird I know!

So, onto the subject of today's email...

If you're like me, you often get to the end of the day and have absolutely no idea where your time went. I have tried writing down each activity in a spreadsheet with time taken etc, but either I forget to write some things down or I get bored and give up.

Well, last week I discovered the most amazing piece of software that helps me track exactly what I've been up to on the computer. And what's more, it has a FREE version! Woohoo! :)

You can check it out here:

http://www.rescuetime.com/

Since I've been using this, my productivity has increased a lot!

Here's a couple of screenshots of my productivity today:

Please enable images to see them.

The red indicates unproductive time, blue productive time and purple neither productive or non productive. As you can see I have been 71% productive overall today - 79% in the morning anf 70% in the afternoon / evening. Yay, me! :)

Other graphs show your productivity by hour and you can see which applications and websites you spent time on and how much time and how productive it was. There are 5 productivity levels:

-2 = Very distracting
-1 = Distracting
 0 = Neutral
 1 = Productive
 2 = Very productive

You can also change the productivity level that has been automatically assigned. Eg the default  for gmail is productive. However, for me, gmail is very distracting so I have changed the level for gmail to -2 (Very distracting).
 
If your productivity could use improvement, then mosey on over to Rescue Time, download it and start using it. I think you'll find it most enlightening and very helpful!
 
Click below to download it:
http://www.rescuetime.com/
 
Feel free to hit reply and let me know what you think of this software or to ask any questions you might have. I'll do my best to reply within 24 hours.

To your success!

Sally