If you want to make changes to the way you work, you need to set goals.
With Goals in RescueTime, you have a powerful tool for tracking your progress and making sure you’re doing the right work every day.
But while daily goals are great for making sure you’re staying on track. It’s sometimes hard to see how much progress you’re making on a larger timescale. And that’s not good.
That’s why this month, we’ve added some awesome new updates to RescueTime Goals to help you see your goal progress over time, track your monthly goals, and discover more insightful trends in your working patterns.
Celebrate your monthly goals with a new email summary
One thing we kept hearing from users is that they wanted to be able to quickly see how they’re progressing towards their goals and when they hit milestones. While you can see these in your dashboard, we decided to create a special email for when you hit a Monthly Goal.
Monthly Goals are calculated based on consistently hitting your Daily Goals. So, if your goal is to do 2 hours of software development per workday, your Monthly Goal will be 46 hours for the month of May (2hrs/day X 23 working days).
The email shows the daily progress leading up to your Monthly Goal, along with interesting stats like your longest day and the top activity you spent time with while working towards the goal.
How to use this:
If you’re a RescueTime Premium member and hit a monthly goal in the past week, you might have already seen this email go out. Otherwise, keep at it!
Why we think you’ll love this:
In our productivity obsessed culture, it’s important to celebrate our wins, no matter how small.
Not only that, but seeing that you’ve hit your monthly goal can help you decide whether or not you’ve set the right goals for yourself.
Did you hit your monthly goal on the 15th? Maybe it’s time to push yourself to do more. Or maybe you hit your time quota with a couple days left in the month and want to take a well-deserved break. However you choose to use these reminders, the more insight into your behaviors, the better.
Daily Goal notifications now include your weekly progress
We’ve also added information about your weekly working trends into RescueTime Goal Alerts.
What this means is that when you hit or miss a Daily Goal, we now show you how much of your weekly quota has been taken up.
So, for example, here’s an Alert I got just the other day when I went over my RescueTime Goal of spending less than 1 hour a day on distracting tasks:
Weekly Progress reports are a great way to get a quick read on how your week is going and make any necessary changes.
How to use this:
Alerts are a RescueTime Premium feature. So to get notifications about your weekly (and daily) goals, you’ll have to have a Premium account. If you’re already a Premium user, you should already be seeing your weekly goals in notifications.
Right now, weekly goals are calculated based on the daily goals you’ve set for yourself. So, for example, my “less than 1 hour of distracting time” goal is set up only on workdays between 6am and 8pm. Meaning my Weekly Goal quota for distracting time is 5 hours during the workweek.
Why we think you’ll love this:
It’s easy to brush off daily goals outside of the bigger context of your working patterns.
If I went over my 1-hour of daily distracting time, I can easily just chalk it up to a bad day. But by seeing that RescueTime Alert in the context of my weekly goal, I can quickly see if I’m having an unproductive week and need to change things up.
So if I go over my weekly quota for distracting time on a Wednesday, I know I should make some changes to my working patterns for the rest of the week (and maybe start using more FocusTime sessions!)
Get a read on your monthly goals with new daily average trend reports
Some days are better than others. And while we can’t expect to do our best work every single day, it’s important to know when we’re slipping on a consistent basis.
You can now see a quick visual trend report for your daily averages for time spent working towards your goals:
In the above example, I can see that over the past 30 days my average time spent writing per day has dropped from 3h 18min to 2hr 45min.
How to use this:
To see your new daily average trend report, log in to your RescueTime account and head to Reports > Goals and then view by month. You’ll be able to see daily average trends for any current goal you have setup.
Why we think you’ll love this:
Consistency is a powerful tool when we want to do meaningful work. And having a better understanding of how our time usage is trending helps us adjust how we spend our days to make sure we’re doing what we want.
Checking in on your trends every week or so is a super fast way to see if you’re spending time the way you want to.
It’s easy to get sucked into thinking about time management and productivity in the short-term. But really, it’s when we make consistent change that we start to see results.
With our new Monthly and Weekly Goal progress, you can now use RescueTime to get a better understanding of how your daily actions stack up. And whether or not you’re making the right changes to hit the goals that are most important to you.
Want to learn more about setting and achieving your goals?
I think this is a great addition to RescueTime. I like that you can see your progress over the week or month. I’m planning to revamp my goals and alerts and this will help.
I think this is a good addition as well. I’ll play with it over the next few weeks to see how I can use it to do better work!