What we learned about productivity from analyzing 225 million hours of working time in 2017

What we learned about productivity from analyzing 225 million hours of working time in 2017

Hardik Gandhi   January 06, 2018

This post was originally published on the RescueTime blog. Check us out for more like it.

When exactly are we the most productive?

Thinking back on your last year, you probably have no idea. Days blend together. Months fly by. And another year turns over without any real understanding of how we actually spent our time.

Our mission at RescueTime has always been to help you do more meaningful work. And this starts with understanding how you spend your days, when you’re most productive, and what’s getting in your way.

In 2017, we logged over 225 million hours of digital time from hundreds of thousands of RescueTime users around the world.

By studying the anonymized data of how people spent their time on their computers and phones over the past 12 months, we’ve pinpointed exactly what days and times we do the most productive work, how often we’re getting distracted by emails or social media, and how much time a week we actually have to do meaningful work.

Key Takeaways:

What was the most (and least) productive day of 2017?

Simply put, our data shows that people were the most productive on November 14th. In fact, that entire week ranked as the most productive of the year.

Which makes sense. With American Thanksgiving the next week and the mad holiday rush shortly after, mid-November is a great time for people to cram in a few extra work hours and get caught up before gorging on Turkey dinner.

On the other side of the spectrum, we didn’t get a good start to the year. January 6th — the first Friday of the year — was the least productive day of 2017.

Now, what do we mean when we talk about the “most” or “least” productive days?

RescueTime is a tool that tracks how you spend your time on your computer and phone and let’s you categorize activities on a scale from very distracting to very productive. So for example, if you’re a writer, time spent in Microsoft Word or Google Docs is categorized as very productive while social media is very distracting.

From that data, we calculate your productivity pulse — a score out of 100 for how much of your time you spent on activities that you deem productive.

On November 14th, the average productivity pulse across all RescueTime users was a not-so-shabby 60.

How much of our day is spent working on a digital device?

One of the biggest mistakes so many of us make when planning out our days is to assume we have 8+ hours to do productive work. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

What we found is that, on average, we only spend 5 hours a day working on a digital device.

And with an average productivity pulse of 53% for the year, that means we only have 12.5 hours a week to do productive work.

What does the average “productive day” look like?

Understanding our overall productivity is a fun exercise, but our data lets us go even deeper.

Looking at the workday (from 8am–6pm, Monday to Friday), how are we spending our time? When do we do our best work? Do different tasks normally get done at different times?

Here’s what we found out:

Our most productive work happens on Wednesdays at 3pm

Our data showed that we do our most productive work (represented by the light blue blocks) between 10 and noon and then again from 2–5pm each day. However, breaking it down to the hour, we do our most productive work on Wednesdays at 3pm.

Light blue represents our most productive work

Email rules our mornings, but never really leaves us alone

Our days start with email, with Monday morning at 9am being the clear winner for most time spent on email during the week.

Light blue represents our busiest time for emails

Software developers don’t hit peak productivity until 2pm each day

What about how specific digital workers spend their days?

Looking at the time spent in software development tools, our data paints a picture of a workday that doesn’t get going until the late morning and peaks between 2–6pm daily.

Light blue represents when we’re using software development tools

While writers are more likely to be early birds

For those who spend their time writing, it’s a different story.

Writing apps were used more evenly throughout each day with the most productive writing time happening on Tuesdays at 10am.

Light blue represents when we’re using writing tools

What were the biggest digital distractions of 2017?

It’s great to pat ourselves on the back about how productive we were in 2017. But we live in a distracted world and one of our greatest challenges is to stay focused and on task.

Here’s what our research discovered about the biggest time wasters of last year:

On an average day we use 56 different apps and websites

Depending on what you do, this number might not seem that bad. However, when we look at how we use those different apps and websites, things get a bit hairier.

When it comes to switching between different apps and websites (i.e. multitasking), we jump from one task to another nearly 300 times per day and switch between documents and pages within a site 1,300 times per day.

For Slack users, 8.8% of our day is spent in the app

There’s been a lot of talk about how much email and communication eats into our days. But what do the numbers look like?

What we found is that for people who use Slack as their work communication tool, they spend almost 10% of their workday in the app (8.8% to be exact).

We check email or IM 40 times every day

What’s more telling is how often we check our communication tools, whether email or instant messengers like Slack or HipChat.

On average, we check our communication apps 40 times a day, or once every 7.5 minutes during our 5 hours of daily digital work time.

Almost 7% of every workday is spent on social media

I’m sure most of us try not to spend time on social media while at work. But our data showed that almost 7% of every workday was spent on social media.

It’s not only time spent that’s the issue, however. On average, we check in on social media sites 14 times per workday, or nearly 3 times an hour during our 5-hour digital day.

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So, what does all this tell us about how we spend our days?

Well, first off, we need to remember that averages shouldn’t be treated as universal truths. Everyone works differently. But having a high-level look at productivity and the things that get in its way is a powerful tool in improving how you work.

The biggest piece of advice we can pull from all this data is to be aware of the limited time you have each day for meaningful work, and spend it wisely.

Our days are filled with distractions, and it’s up to us to protect what time we have.

I Was Supposed to be an Architect

I Was Supposed to be an Architect

Hardik Gandhi   January 04, 2018

I’m leading a VR development studio, but the truth is I’ve been navigating a series of epic career learning curves that have taken me far outside of my comfort zone, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Mainstreet, Mall or Modem

On my quest to start sharing more about our process and lessons learned on the virtual frontier, I thought I’d start with a bit of background on how I arrived here in the first place.

I studied and practiced architecture, but I’ve been fascinated with virtual technologies as far back as I can remember. In fact, my architectural thesis project in grad school (image above) focused on how VR and digital technologies would someday revolutionize architecture — specifically retail architecture. This was 17 years ago, when VR was very expensive, and largely inaccessible, but the brilliant pioneers at work innovating in this field were demonstrating the massive potential. It was only a matter of time before VR would find a way to mainstream.

Like so many other physical manifestations, from music to books and beyond, I believe buildings are subject to a similar digital transcendence. It’s already happening in a pretty big way, and this is just the beginning of a major architectural transformation that might take another decade or two to fully surface, but I digress… I’m saving this interest for a future pivot, and almost certainly another epic learning curve to go with it.

I tried using Everquest to visualize architecture.

I had a level 47 Dark Elf Shadow Knight in Everquest, but spent most of my time wandering around, exploring the environments. What I really wanted to do was import my own architectural models to explore them inside the game.

If they could have such elaborate dungeons and forts to explore in Everquest, with people from all around the world working together in the game virtually, why couldn’t the same technology also be used to visualize a new construction project, with the architect, building owner, and construction team exploring or collaborating on the design together?

This quest to visualize architecture in a real-time world became a ‘first principle’ in my career path that I’ve been chasing ever since.

I met my amazing and tremendously patient wife, Kandy, in grad school, and after studying architecture together in Europe and graduating, we practiced architecture for some time before starting our own firm, Crescendo Design, focused on eco-friendly, sustainable design principles.

Then one day in 2006, I read an article in Wired about Second Life — a massively multi-player world where users could create their own content. Within an hour, I was creating a virtual replica of a design we had on the boards at the time. I had to use the in-world ‘prims’ to build it, but I managed.

I was working in a public sandbox at the time, and when I had the design mostly finished, I invited the client in to explore it. They had 2 young kids, who were getting a huge kick out of this watching over their parent’s shoulders as they walked through what could soon be their new home.

The Naked Lady, the Sheriff Bunny, and Epic Learning Curve #1.

We walked in the front door, when suddenly a naked woman showed up and started blocking the doorways. I reported her to the ‘Linden’ management, and a little white bunny with a big gold sheriff’s badge showed up and kicked her out. “Anything else I can help with?” Poof.. the bunny vanished and we continued our tour. That’s when I realized I needed my own virtual island (and what an odd place Second Life was).

But then something amazing happened that literally changed my career path, again.

I left one of my houses in that public sandbox overnight. When I woke up in the morning and logged in, someone had duplicated the house to create an entire neighborhood — and they were still there working on it.

Architectural Collaboration on Virtual Steroids

I walked my avatar, Keystone Bouchard, into one of the houses and found a group of people speaking a foreign language (I think it was Dutch?) designing the kitchen. They had the entire house decorated beautifully.

One of the other houses had been modified by a guy from Germany who thought the house needed a bigger living room. He was still working on it when I arrived, and while he wasn’t trained in architecture, he talked very intelligently about his design thinking and how he resolved the new roof lines.

I was completely blown away. This was architectural collaboration on virtual steroids, and opened the door to another of the ‘first principle’ vision quests I’m still chasing. Multi-player architectural collaboration in a real-time virtual world is powerful stuff.

Steve Nelson, Jon Brouchoud, and Carl Bass delivering Keynote at Autodesk University 2006

One day Steve Nelson’s avatar, Kiwini Oe, visited my Architecture Island in Second Life and offered me a dream job designing virtual content at his agency, Clear Ink, in Berkeley, California. Kandy and I decided to relocate there from Wisconsin, where I enjoyed the opportunity to build virtual projects for Autodesk, the U.S. House of Representatives, Sun Microsystems and lots of other virtual installations. I consider that time to be one of the most exciting in my career, and it opened my eyes to the potential for enterprise applications for virtual worlds.

Wikitecture

I started holding architectural collaboration experiments on Architecture Island. We called it ‘Wikitecture.’ My good friend, Ryan Schultz, from architecture school suggested we organize the design process into a branching ‘tree’ to help us collaborate more effectively.

Studio Wikitecture was born, and we went on to develop the ‘Wiki Tree’ and one of our projects won the Founder’s Award and third place overall from over 500 entries worldwide in an international architecture competition to design a health clinic in Nyany, Nepal.

These were exciting times, but we were constantly faced with the challenge that we weren’t Second Life’s target audience. This was a consumer-oriented platform, and Linden Lab was resolutely and justifiably focused on growing their virtual land sales and in-world economy, not building niche-market tools to help architects collaborate. I don’t blame them — more than 10 years after it launched, it still has a larger in-world economy of transactions of real money than some small countries.

We witnessed something truly extraordinary there — something I haven’t seen or felt since. Suffice it to say, almost everything I’ve done in the years since have been toward my ultimate goal of someday, some way, somehow, instigating the conditions that gave rise to such incredible possibilities. We were onto something big.

Xiaomi and HomeKit

Xiaomi and HomeKit

Hardik Gandhi   January 04, 2018

Xiaomi Starter Kit (image via Smart-Home Hobby)

I’ve been building my smart home over the last few years and was in the market to add sensors everywhere in an effort to improve the automations that I was able to achieve.

I previously had a couple of Philips Hue Motion sensors, and Elgato Eve Door & Window sensors, but at £35 a piece, adding these to all rooms and door would get very expensive. I was introduced to the Xiaomi ecosystem and decided to give it a try. Interestingly this is the first time that I’ve opted to buy some non native devices and rely on Homebridge for the integration. Prior to this, I’ve used HomeBridge as a way to integrate tech that I already owned.

Purchase

I got all of my kit from a site called Lightinthebox.com. This was the only site that I found that shipped to the UK and had a wide range stocked. I initially opted for:

• Door and Window sensor x5 (currently £6.13 each)
• Gateway (currently £17.88)

I was that impressed with the kit that I purchased some more:

• Door and Window sensor; another 5
• Motion Sensor (currently £8.12 each)
• Smart Button (currently £5.27 each)

One thing to note is that the website quoted 5–8 days for shipping — this was actually more like 19, but for the price I can’t really complain.

Setup

The setup was fairly trivial. I did however need to upgrade my version of node running on my RPi3 to work with the plugin. As to not waste countless hours in node dependency hell, I’d recommend a fresh install of everything. I took a copy of my config.json file, made a note of installed plugins and completely wiped my SD card.

Follow these steps to get going (this assumes you’re on an iPhone, running iOS 11 or later)

• Download the MiHome app and setup the gateway and configure your accessories. It doesn’t really matter what rooms the devices are placed in.
• Open the MiHome app, tap on the gateway, then tap on the 3 dots in the top right corner.
• Select about and then repeatedly (and quickly) tap on the blank space until three additional menu options in Chinese appear.
• Tap the second option. This allows you to turn on local access mode. A password should appear. Make a note as you’ll need that soon.
• Tap back and select the 3rd option. Make a note of the MAC address of the gateway. There’s a couple listed, one of the router that the gateway is connected to and one for the gateway itself. If it’s unclear which is which, try both. (If you run homebridge with the -D flag, you’ll get debug info which will let you know if you’ve connected to the gateway correctly).
• Install the homebridge-mi-aqara plugin and input the MAC and password from the steps above into your config.json file.
• Restart HomeBridge and your accessories should now appear.

Usage

The first thing to note is how tiny the door sensors are. Here’s an image with the Elgato Eve as a comparison. Due to the size of the Eve device and the trim around my doors, I’ve had to be creative with how I mount it.

Xiaomi (left) vs Elgato Eve (right) door sensors

The second thing to note is how quickly these sensors update within HomeKit — unscientifically I’d say this is instant. Even with the latest firmware the Elgato sensors still have a slight delay if that haven’t been triggered for a period of time. This still makes them unsuitable for certain automations, where you need a light to turn on immediately for example.

Xiaomi door sensors in HomeKit

The door sensors show up as regular sensors, along with three other accessories from the gateway; a light sensor, multi colour light and a switch. The light actually makes a pretty decent nightlight, especially as you don’t need to physically connect it to a router.

I’ve got a couple of automations setup where I use a door sensor in combination with a motion sensor to detect if somebody is entering or leaving a room. To do this I have a motion sensor on each side of the door and then use the motion as a conditional rule. For example, I want to turn on a table lamp in my daughters room when the door opens, but only between 5am and 8am. This assumes that I’m going in to her room when she is awake and that I want the light to come on with a soft glow. It also assumes that if I’m already in the room and leave during that window that I don’t want to like to come on (if for example she actually isn’t awake, or she settles back to sleep). To do this, I have a motion sensor on the landing and in her room (via a D Link Omna camera) with a rule stating that the lamp should only come on when there is motion detected on the landing. If there is motion on the landing then I must be outside of the room, therefore entering. If there’s motion in the room, then I’m leaving so the rule doesn’t trigger again.

To get the extra option I used the Elgato Eve app. Firstly setup the basic automation rules in the Apple Home app, and then add the condition using Eve.

So far, I’m really impressed with the Xiaomi system and would certainly consider adding more devices (although you can only add 30 per gateway) to my setup.

2018 Best Running Headphones

2018 Best Running Headphones

Hardik Gandhi   January 03, 2018

As we’re getting ready to ship your Axum earbuds next month,

we still get lots of questions from customers about the sound quality.

How’s the highs? what made your bass so good?

So I’ll try to explain in 2–3 minutes how implementing Qualcomm’s technology helped us achieve CD-Quality sound.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, Qualcomm is the world leader in mobile technologies.

Several years ago they’ve acquired a company from the UK that changed the game in wireless audio.

What’s so special about them?

Well, let’s just say they took the CD-Quality sound and were able to reproduce it over wireless connectivity-

Yes, I know it sounds simple but it’s quite a big problem.

As we said in the past, we’re using it in Axum and that’s 1 of our secrets.

Now for those of you who want to get technical and learn more (I’ll be honest with you, once the engineer told me about it I spent the night digging into it) I’ll explain how it works:

When sending music over wireless connectivity,

it breaks as the bandwidth isn’t big enough.

So what they did?

They split those files into smaller ones,

this way you can stream it over wireless connectivity.

But the best part?

You’ll get the same wired sound quality!

As for the bass, what made it so good is:

1. Our custom made driver, that we’ve been testing over and over for the last 14 months
2. Maybe you saw those $1 speakers that you place on your table and suddenly the entire table starts shaking from the bass (I’ll ignore their joy-risking horrible sound quality)? as it turns into the kind of bass box for the speaker. Great, so one major factor with sound is the acoustics and shape of the earbuds and that’s why we had to do so many tests with the plastics and internal design. We knew that every 1mm change (especially with such a small product) will have a huge impact on the sound.

In production, like in life, there are no shortcuts.

You want to achieve the best?

You want to make an awesome product?

You want to beat the competition?

Well, in such case you’ll have to outwork your competition!

We knew the ONLY way to achieve success was to push our limits

and make another test, another prototype, another upgrade,

and when we thought “that’s it, Axum is ready…” to try another change,

another solution to make it even better.

And trust me, we wish we could make it on the first try and ship it.

But that’s the beautiful world we’re living it,

full of surprises and great rewards for those who go all-in with their goals.

These kind of things (and hundred more) is what turns Axum,

into the 2018 best running headphones!

In conclusion, I don’t think we ever said it,

but we are proud to have you on board!

We know that you’re real pusher, winner,

the kind of person who can’t quit and always raising the bar for others!

And that’s what Axum is all about.

Next month we start shipping and you better in get in shape!