Digital Mastery

The digital revolution plays a huge part in our lives today. It can greatly increase efficiency, but it can also result in excessive distraction and overwhelm. 

Putting all the systems in place to master your digital world is key to sustained and effortless productivity. 

RescueTime 

This little app is the first step to digital mastery.

It will give you an objective indication of how you spend your digital time. In addition, it has a surprisingly convenient offline time logging solution that gives you a complete picture of where your time goes. 

RescueTime can help you gradually transition from months that look like this:

To ones that look like this:

Dark blue = Online productive time; Light blue = Offline productive time; Grey = Neutral time; Red = Distracting time.

Obviously, a career filled with months like the second example will take you to much more interesting places in life.

A key feature of RescueTime is it’s ability to block distracting websites after a given amount of use time. 

Empty information is just like empty calories: In the moment, it can feel irresistible, but, if you can just get past that moment, the feeling dissipates. RescueTime gets you past that critical moment. 

The amount of productive time that this RescueTime feature has added to my life has already repaid the price of the app a hundred times over. 

Download it, get the premium version, set up alerts to automatically block distractions, customize your offline time logging, and see what happens 🙂

Add and remove friction

Digital mastery revolves around a simple practice: eliminating friction from productive activities and adding friction to distracting activities. 

Here are some examples of ways to remove friction involved in digital productivity:

  • Ensure that you have all the hardware and software you need to create real value. 
  • Dedicate time to master the software you use most often through tutorials or courses. 
  • Build up a strong repertoire of keyboard shortcuts.
  • Use a keystroke launcher.
  • Keep your files nicely organized with automatic cloud backup.

The two most valuable friction additions are RescueTime’s distraction blocker and intelligent reorganization of your phone. 

Carefully think through your digital world to find additional places to add and remove friction. These environmental triggers can add many years of deeply rewarding productive time to your life.