“Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to.” I believe I first heard this exhortation from Howard Rheingold. Don’t know if he said it first or got it from some other wise person. It’s always struck me as good advice. And as I return from a week spent entirely offline I find myself wanting to take it — in a systematic way.
People go on diets where they watch what their bodies consume. Some of us keep budgets where we track the money we earn and spend. What about pursuing a similar approach to the information we feed our minds?
I’d like to do this: take some period of time — a day, a week? — and track exactly how I’m spending my media time. I’ve read about the concept of the media fast, but this is something different — more like keeping a food diary for one’s media intake.
Are there any tools out there for doing this? Examples of other people who’ve done it? I’ve googled “Media audit” but, alas, this phrase appears to have been monopolized by the advertising industry. Maybe Lifehacker has posted on this? Post me some pointers and I’ll follow up.
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.
If you use Google Reader to read RSS anf Atom feeds, they have good tools which show which blogs you read the most in the “Trends” section. Of course, this won’t help you audit other sites that you don’t read through a newsreader.
Scott, check out Tasktop:
http://tasktop.com/
and they just, JUST put in time-tracking. I *think* it will do what you want.
When you start working on a new task (e.g. “Write blog posting on how Wright was taken out of context”), you tell Tasktop that you’re working on that task. It watches and remembers what you are working on. It only shows you the artifacts (docs, files, web pages, email messages) related to that task. (You can switch the hiding off for a moment in order to find another artifact.)
When you start to a new task (e.g. “Research/buy new bookshelf”), you tell Tasktop that you’re on a new task and all of the blog posting artifacts disappear. Repeat.
When you switch back to the Wright blog posting, then all the bookshelf artifacts disappear *and all the artifacts that you were working with for the Wright blog posting reappear*.
Disclaimer #1: I haven’t used Tasktop myself, as I use Linux. I have used Mylyn, the precursor.
Disclaimer #2: The CEO of Tasktop is my advisor.
Thanks, Kevin and Ducky! GReader I know all about, but I really want to put the time spent in RSS in context against, for example, time spent with newspaper/time spent with broadcast/etc.
I’ll check out Tasktop — looks like a cool thing to know about whether it ends up fitting this bill or not…
Scott, you might want to take a look at http://www.rescuetime.com/ – it snoops on what programs you’re using and what web sites you’re reading, and phones home to their site which shows you some nice summary graphs (and tries to rate your productivity).
The time spent on individual sites can sometimes be surprising, and it’s interesting to look back on an afternoon of web surfing and see exactly how the time flew…
In fact, the data generated by the probe is cached locally in a readable form, and I’ve even written a script to convert tracked activities into iCal events, so you can picture what you were doing all day. I’d be glad to share that script if anyone’s interested.
Hmm, after re-reading your last comment, rescuetime would probably only help if you used your computer to read newspapers and watch TV too.
Although, if you visualize time spent on the computer, you can more easily fill in the gaps when your attention was elsewhere…
For Macintosh users, there is the free program Slife which watches what you do and records it all. They are working on a Windows version.
To go beyond the computer, you’d need a more general (but somewhat manual) system. Tempo would probably work. You could use a mobile web browser to enter the time spent on each media.
I was going to mention Google Reader’s “Trends” section, but Kevin already has…
My delicious bookmarks provide a most reliable account for my media consumption. Time spent in each site is, in my case, absolutely irrelevant, for I use to keep many (>20) webpages open at the same time, sometimes for more than 24 hours, until more room is needed or browser crash risk is dangerously high, whatever happens first.