I installed RescueTime on Chrome and on my Android device. One of the interesting things I noticed is that, by default, RescueTime considers news reading as unproductive time. You can change that, but I started thinking about what productivity really means, as the concept may vary greatly depending on you field of work. I also had to make some corrections, for example, in cases where I watched videos on YouTube, but they were instructional and couldn’t be accounted in the entertainment category.

I had a look at the graphs provided by the application and took some notes. It may seem a little obvious, but it was interesting to see that most of my media consumption happened at the weekends. Also, I realized I haven’t been reading much news, for many of the articles I read in that category were actually opinion articles on culture, music or art.

So yes, I noticed is that I have a “high entertainment” media diet. But the information may be a bit misleading because I listen to music on Spotify or YouTube while working. For that reason I chose to restrict the color palette so that periods of media consumption higher than 3 hours wouldn’t impact the visualization too much.

I also grouped the media consumed by format: video, audio or text & other. This was not very accurate, for I simply tried to remember what was the media format for that link. But it is still interesting to notice that a big part of the media I consume is in text format. Photo galleries and some applications that were hard to define are grouped in the “text & other” category, but they represented a very small part in the whole.