Ed Bradburn's dashboard

Here's the scenario:

You set yourself a goal: "Less than 1 hour on News/Blogs a day".

OK, no problem. But after a week or so, you realise you are hitting the goal easily every day. Now you have to go back and change it. Maybe now you input 50 minutes -- or 45.

But wouldn't it be great if you could say at the outset: "Less than 1 hour on News/Blogs per day, dropping to less than 20 minutes in a month".

Now RescueTime can just adjust the goal as appropriate, making it harder and harder for you to attain.

Obviously, positive goals can work the other way: "Minimum of 10 minutes daily on learning Chinese, rising to 30 minutes in 6 months".

I think it would be easy to implement: you just need "Start" and "End" goals. The start goal would be what we have now, and the end goal would be a new one. If you don't want a time-based change, you just leave the end goal blank.

(Extra:

What would be even neater is if RescueTime did the change for you, automatically.

Like: "10 minutes per day on Chinese, and please increase my time slowly if I keep meeting the goal. If I don't, keep me on 10."

I'm not sure how easy that would be to implement, but it would rock as a feature.)

So, what does everyone think?

(I'm off now to set myself a goal of "No more than 20 minutes on getsatisfaction.com per day ;-))

I was reading Ian's post about efficiency not adding up to 100% and it gave me the following idea.

A different metric (optional?) for measuring efficiency.

The current system is OK for starters, but promotes the idea that banging away at efficiency +2 is somehow the best way to spend your time.

I don't think so. While coding (+2 productivity, let's say) is OK for a couple of hours, coding for 8 non-stop may well mean you are banging your head against a wall. Or in danger or burnout :=)

Therefore: "working on a productive task" is not as good as (or the same as) "working productively".

But how can we measure "working productively"?

Simple (we steal the idea from Ian's post): we set ourselves a package of goals, and productive means "working towards these goals". In addition, efficient means "meeting all of these goals" (or, in a more complex set-up, a certain percentage).

The last point reflects the point I made above: if I set myself a goal of 2 hours of learning Chinese a week, then I am 100% efficient if I meet that goal. If I spend 3 hours on Chinese, I am only efficient if I met all my other goals -- since that extra hour might have cost me an hour doing my invoices (another goal I have set).

So what we need (basics -- it needs some thinking out):

- Ability to use goals as a metric for efficiency
- Productivity as a separate metric (i.e. you can be productive without being efficient). Ideally, the two would be in perfect harmony: high productivity and high efficiency. But very high or very low productivity usually mean problems with efficiency IMHO
- Efficiency measured as meeting all goals -- efficiency goes down if you miss them

That's just half an hour of kicking the idea around.

What do people think?