[caption id=“attachment_533” align=“alignright” width=“300”] By: Rubbermaid Products[/caption] I’ve been working with RescueTime for the past week and I’m VERY happy. First off, I don’t have to change a thing to make use of the system. It’s a great way to benchmark my own time spending habits on the computer. It’s well setup to allow individual configuration of what you believe is productive and non-productive. During setup, I thought about all the facets of business and independent projects. I concluded that email is a neutral value of productivity, while programming is +2 and reading HackerNews is -2. I’m happy to share this chart for my first week of use: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1035”] RescueTime - 1st Week[/caption] Notice that I tagged email and meetings as a productivity of 0 because so little useful action comes out of them. Frequently meetings would be best accomplished in short bursts and email involves _LOTS_ of needless repetition. Given that email accounted for 6 hours of my workweek, I decided to improve the efficiency of my email process. I setup my email account with OtherInbox. OtherInbox is an email sorting service that does awesome things with Google Labels. Next I added two key combinations for Sparrow.app. One key combination opens a new email from ANY application while the other key combo brings Sparrow to forefront or hides it again. These two changes have saved me lots of time so far and reduced the effort related to context switching. Share your tips for email hacks and productivity (GTD) hacks! I can be reached via the comments and as [@_ZPH] on Twitter.