Ever returned home exhausted from a busy day at work, yet unable to recall what you actually accomplished?
Robby Macdonell has. Ten years ago, he was working at a startup that required employees to provide daily production reports. The effect was demoralizing: he and his fellow engineers could never account for more than four or five hours — and that was on a good day.
“That doesn’t feel very good, especially if you’re having that experience day after day,” Macdonell said. “We thought ‘Oh, we must be slacking off way more than we thought.’ You can imagine what that does to your feeling of self worth, especially if you value the contribution you make to your job.”
Macdonell and fellow engineers decided to figure out if they could collect data on what they’d been doing all day, and began writing scripts and pumping out iterations. The result? An app called RescueTime, which tracks where users spend their screen time across desktop and mobile, including phone calls, URLs and applications like Slack, Jira and Instagram.
Last week, the Seattle-based company announced a new iOS app along with handful of new functions, giving users the ability to set maximum or minimum time goals for certain websites, applications and their associated tasks (and nudges to support them); charts and graphs breaking down how they spend their screen time; and a series of easily-digestible insights so users don’t have to dive deep into graphs and charts to see how they’re tracking against goals.
Though RescueTime has been around for a decade, the updates come at an auspicious time. As groups like the Center for Humane Technology question the ethics of building products designed to grab and retain users’ attention at all costs, both Apple and Android have rolled out tools to help customers manage their screen time in recent months.
So what did Macdonell — RescueTime’s CEO — and his team discover about their wasted time?
“The first thing we thought — and over the last decade I’ve heard literally thousands of people say the same thing — was ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to see how much time I spend on Facebook, or Reddit, or Twitter.’”
“But when people see what reality looks like, those assumptions usually turn out to be wrong,” Macdonell said. “It turns out that you don’t have to guilt yourself in most cases.”
But the question remained: What was causing all those unaccountable hours?
“Things that were actually work, but that we would never report as work: instant messaging, email, meetings, time spent in Jira triaging bugs,” Macdonell said.
According to RescueTime’s data, we spend a lot of time multitasking — even though only two percent of the population is actually good at it. Worse still, the more the rest of us try, the worse we become. And the situation is not improving.
These things that are supposed to increase collaboration are great. But they come at a cost.”
“We thought we had problems with distraction in 2008, and that was when the iPhone had just come out,” Macdonell said. “Since then, there has been an explosion of things that clamor for your attention — and a pretty meaningful amount are work-related.”
RescueTime recently found that, on average, people check email, Slack or other group chat applications every five minutes while they’re at work. Compare that with a range of studies saying it takes somewhere between seven and 30 minutes to refocus on a task, and the problem becomes clear.
“These things that are supposed to increase collaboration are great, and there are aspects of them which are valid and important,” Macdonell said. “But they come at a cost: our ability to do the work that tends to be on our job descriptions, the work we say we do as professionals, the work we really value. That’s the stuff that’s getting clobbered.”
Macdonell says workers and organizations need to get better at protecting space for deep thinking, and learn to balance the need for collaboration and responsiveness with an understanding that people need space to stop and to think — and ultimately, to do their best work.
