The Egg-Splat of Screen Time in 2020

I’ve used RescueTime to track my computer and phone usage for a few years now, and it continues to be a surprisingly underrated tool in my kit. Today they sent in my year in review for 2020, showing me how I spent my screen time throughout last year, and it was really interesting to note some of the ways the data is different to previous years. Case in point, the little egg-splat they produce that visually represents your time by month and category.

I’m used to these being an irregular shape, but the April-through-May bulge is one of those aberrations that tells me just how different 2020 was to a regular year. There’s a massive blow-out in “general utilities” time, which proves to be the endless hours spent learning to use Zoon and teaching online when the university closed the campus. It’s accompanied by a bulge in my purple “research” hours, which is basically how RescueTime logs “hours spent reading blogs and ebooks.”

At the same time, I also find myself looking at the big block of “design & composition” green in late May, trying to figure out why I’ve logged so much productive time without having anything to show for it. The answer, digging into those months, is a combination of a freelance gig that would not die and a massive surge in PhD writing as I tried to put half-finished parts to bed before taking a leave of absence in July. Both were huge jobs that basically dropped off my radar the moment they were done, and thus feel largely invisible to me as I look back at the things I did with 2020.

And this, at its core, is one of the reasons I find RescueTime valuable: it makes the invisible visible. It renders what actually happens at the computer as data, which often doesn’t match my assumptions. This end-of-year stuff is valuable, but my favourite use of it is checking the log at the end of the day. Often, when I’ve got the feeling that I’ve worked so hard for very little progress on a project, RescueTime will quietly inform me that has more to do with spending all my time doing other things. I’ll have spent 45 minutes of a four-hour block of time actually staring at the work document, and the rest of the time clicking around the internet or answering email.

Which often means I can sit down and give the project a little extra time and turn a day where I’m unsatisfied with my progress into one where I’m pretty damn happy, instead of railing against how hard things are (although, occasionally, an extra hour just confirms I’m trying to do something pretty damn hard, but that’s a useful data point in and of itself).

There is a lot more the software can do, especially on a paid plan, but I get a huge amount of value from the free option. It’s worth checking out if you enjoy the idea of tracking data.