Cool tools for time management

Amantha Inbat. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy invent Him. And this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. If I were to ask you how you spent your time online yesterday, would you actually know? Would you know about how many minutes you spent on various sites like YouTube, Facebook, your local news website, true to collaborative websites like Google Docs. Chances are you probably wouldn't know.

But self awareness is everything when it comes to managing our time. If we don't know how we are spending our time, it's really hard to know what changes that we can make to save time or use our time more wisely. So this is where Rooster comes in very handy. Rooster is a Chrome plugin, which means you install it and it runs in the background of your Chrome browser and it tracks your online behavior in the background as

you go about your day. So what it does it tells you specifically how much time you're spending on every single website you visit throughout the day, and you can even set it to be the default homepage when you open up a new browser window, so that you're constantly

reminded of how you are choosing to spend your time. So, for example, I'm recording this episode in the morning, and I'm looking at Rooster now and it's telling me that I haven't done much web surfing today, So it's saying I've spent fourteen minutes on Gmail, which is very unusual for me, because firstly, I don't use Gmail as my email checking software, but it was because i was programming a mail merch to go out. And I've also spent six minutes in Google Docs, which was related to that

task that I was doing this morning. So I find Rooster super helpful because I think it's really easy to go down internet black holes and be completely unaware of it. So I love anything that brings more self awareness in terms of how I'm using my time, So I strongly recommend trying out Rooster Go to get rooster dot inn to check it out, and I also linked that in the show notes. Now, have you ever thought to yourself, I don't have time for more things in my life?

You know, it might be that you think you don't have time to take up a new hobby, or to exercise more than once or twice a week, or perhaps you feel like you're too busy to adopt a new habit that you know would be good for you, maybe like meditation for example. But here's the thing you probably do, which brings me to the second tool I want to talk about, which is Eric Rud's Free Time Calculator. So this comes from Eric Rud er Ic Rood, and I'll

link to that in the show notes. Eric has created a very cool tool that calculates and visualizes the free time that you have. So this calculator ask you to input things like how much time you spend sleeping, how much time you spend at work, how much time you spend working out, how much time you spend doing chores eating, all those sorts of things, and then it runs an analysis and tells you how many free hours you have

per week. I personally found this free time calculator really puts time in perspective and will definitely make you think twice before you say I'd like to do that, but I don't have the time. I dare say that this free time calculator will really challenge this assumption. And I think that that's very, very useful. Okay, I want you to think about your workday yesterday, and I want to know how many times did you dip into your inbox. If you're like the average person, you would have done

this every six minutes. And I think that you know that that's probably not ideal. And you know, we all know that email is highly addictive. It's designed to be that way. But if we can ditch our email addiction and batch check our email instead, whereby you only check your inbox three or four times a day, you'll be far more productive and far less reactive. And this final

tool will help you do just that. It's a tool that I found out about from tech entrepreneur Ashatosh Priya Dashi, who is the founder of Sansama, and this tool is an email client which means that if you're using say Outlook or Gmail, you can actually run your email through this software and have this be the main interface that you check your email through and respond to email with. So this software is called Tempo, and what Tempo does

is it actually forces batch checking of email. So the default setting in Tempo is that it only lets you receive emails two or three times a day. And I love this. I think this is a really brave choice in terms of software design, because everyone wants their software to be sticky, everyone wants you using their software as much as possible. But instead Tempo said, well, actually no, you'll be more productive if you're not constantly checking email.

So look, you can override the default if you really want to. But I think that Tempo is a really interesting email software to try out. Now I must add some full disclosure here. I have not actually tried out Tempo because I am completely in love with Superhuman, another email client that I do talk about on the show occasionally, and I feel like I've invested so much time in learning all the shortcuts in Superhuman that it does become

very quick for me. And to make sure I'm not checking it constantly, I just close the software application when I'm not using it. But I think that if you're not like me, and you're not particularly attached to the email client or email software that you're currently using, Tempo is an awesome thing to give a go to, and it might help you be more productive and tame your email addiction. So there we have it. Three things that you might want to try out today or this week

to help manage your time better. So that is it for today's show. If you found it useful, if there were some useful tools that you think other people in your life might benefit from, why not share this episode with them. That is one of the ways that more people have found out about how I work. So that is it for today's show, and I will see you next time.