RescueTime: a tool that can help students cure procrastination

RescueTime touts itself as “a personal analytics service that shows you how you spend your time and provides tools to help you be more productive.” In other words, RescueTime studies your computer habits and tells you when you’re slacking off instead of doing what’s important. It’s a really useful and convenient tool that does not require much to set it up – all its analysis work runs in background and it automatically generates the data it gets from observing what you do on your computer. It is primarily targeted towards businesses and professional individuals, but students would find it valuable as well during times when they are studying, writing their academic papers, or researching on the Internet.  Nowadays, there are a lot of social networks and other distracting sites that can make students lose focus.

Many young people do not realize how much time they spend on sites like Facebook and Twitter. For example, even if you only spend about 15 minutes at a time on those sites, if you have multiple 15-minute visits within the day, it’s potentially going to accumulate to a lot of lost time. Students can use RescueTime to find out just how long they spend on non-school-related sites. They can just let RescueTime run in the background while they go on about their usual business on the computer. The software will then measure the time they spend using certain computer programs or browsing a website. After that, it will come up with time graphs, detailed tables, and a list of applications, sites, and other activities the user has spent time on. Students can look at this data and see just how effective they made use of their time.

Moreover, students can use RescueTime to improve their focus. How many times have you promised yourself that you would study for an hour or so before taking a break, only to find yourself getting distracted along the way? Before you know it, you’re putting off work that you promised to do today. Well, using a nice feature called Focus Time, you could set the length of time you want to focus on studying, and during that period, RescueTime will then block access to everything on your list of distracting sites. This will ensure that you stick to your commitment and get more things done, effectively doing away with procrastination.

Of course, everyone has to give themselves some leeway for leisure. Giving yourself a break for some non-work related activities can actually improve productivity, as long as you make sure you don’t end up doing more of these activities than actual work. With RescueTime, students can set a certain amount of time they allow themselves to spend on distracting / non productive sites and activities. For example, you tell yourself that it’s okay for you to spend about 1 hour on Facebook per day. You set your preferences on RescueTime, and then the program will alert you if you are close to reaching, or have already reached, that limit, essentially telling you to go back to work.

It’s important for students to learn how best to manage their time so that they can make the most efficient use of it. RescueTime can help them in this aspect of personal development.

You can get Rescue time from here: Rescue Time website.