A. The Problem and The Pitch

Do you feel satisfied after a day of work? Or burned out? 😮‍💨

Or do you feel you were distracted? 😯 

There is a simple 3-step process for getting the best out of your workweek:

1. 🗓️ Plan ahead

2. ✅ Do a single task at a time

3. 📝 Review your week

The best follow this approach. Straight out of the 'what gets measured, gets managed' playbook. For this, you need better insight into how you ACTUALLY spend your time.

But as Rahul Vohra, co-founder of Superhuman, puts it:

Do you know how you spend your time? Most people don't.

Yes, you have a calendar. But calendars are poor reflections of reality. Urgent tasks require our attention; important work may not even be on our calendars.

So, how does Rahul Vohra do it? 🤔

Step 1: He manually logs his every single daily activity as it happens (on Slack!)

Step 2: He sends the logs to his EA (Executive Assistant) who helps him analyze it

Now, what if you had someone to do all this for you?

And make sense of the insights? 🤯

That's Rize ♥️

Time is your most valuable asset. And Rize helps you understand how you spend it so you can be more efficient and continually improve.

Try free for 1 month (Mac & Windows)

All this is great. But your natural question might be:

How can this provide me with tangible benefits?

Here are just a handful:

⌛ Get back time

1. Find your invisible inhibitors → Tasks that break your flow, but you don't know about it. For me, this was reading newsletters and scrolling through Twitter after Zoom calls.

2. Gauge your visible time sinks → Tasks that you know are bad for your flow. But not how bad! For me, this was my time spent checking messages on Slack and Googling for quick questions like time zone conversions. Now I do it on Raycast.

🙅 Avoid Burnout

1. Leave behind multitasking → Rize will show you how context switching affects your daily performance.

2. Avoid overworking → Taking frequent breaks doesn't come naturally to most of us. That's something the Pomodoro technique talks about.

😌 Feel Happy

1. Sense of achievement → There's a lot to tell us what we haven't done through the week like our pending to-do list and unread messages. We absolutely deserve a pat on the back for what we HAVE done 🎉

2. Effective weekly review → Even doing a quick review of the past week's activities can tell us 2-3 things that could be improved the next time. E.g., you can start time blocking tasks. Pick 1 priority task and block out 1-3 hours to work.

Get deep work done with Rize.

Try free for 1 month (Mac & Windows)

B. What's special?

1. 🦸 Super EA-like tracking: Rize automatically tracks and categorizes your work activity in real-time. Understand how your time is spent, how to reclaim focus time, and how to optimize breaks and meetings

   

2. 📊 One level deeper and adaptive: Rize provides a daily score with in-depth metrics so you can quantify and track your focus. And you don't need to look at this every day. You can do a quick review at the end of the week. It took me just 2 weeks to make a few big changes!

   

3. 👋 Proactive to help out: Study after study shows that taking frequent breaks improves your productivity. Rize analyzes your work activity and notifies you when to take a break at the right time. Rize will also alert you after working a set number of hours to avoid overworking and prevent burnout.

   

It has received some great feedback 🥰

Try free for 1 month (Mac & Windows)

C. What's more?

• 🤗 Trouble sleeping? Burnout is more than a mental and physical breakdown. Early signs include needing coffee to function, lower energy levels, and sighing more than usual. Does it sound familiar? It’s also predictable in 10 questions 👉 Journify

• 📘 If you liked this piece, you might like Make Time, a book rethinking the defaults of constant busyness and distraction so you can focus on what matters every day.

• 📱 If you need a basic timekeeper for your Android phone, here's YourHour.

• 💁 Other apps in the time tracking space are Toggl and RescueTime.

• 🙀 And yes, cats are afraid of cucumbers. Don't experiment with this though.

D. What’s next in the 🗓️ App Advent Calendar?

🧬 Dec 9: Operating system for life (I’ve received the most mails and tweets in anticipation of this one 🤔)

🗓️ Dec 10: Superpower your planning

📬 Dec 11: All messages in one place (No more switching across Twitter, iMessage, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and whatnot)