Just last week, I was talking with one of my recruiters about setting goals. One suggestion was better time management in her research, recruiting and client management. We discussed some options to employ and that we’d check-in later to see what progress had been made.

Question: How can you audit yourself?

Answer: Review and grade your calendar when compared to your actions perhaps? Look to your results (more calls, contacts, candidates, closes, better quality, etc.)? Yes, possibly, to both. Let me introduce a third option.

I was shown RescueTime by Shally Steckerl in a recent training visit to our organization. This is a free, graphical self-audit of your laptop use.

After creating an account, you can easily:

• Tag different applications and websites you visit to describe how you use them (work, personal, professional, social media, reading, etc.).
• Those tags and related categories are assigned (positive or negative) value.

RescueTime then (takes over tracks use) unclear and asks you about new apps and sites you begin to use. Then, the naked truth shows up with an easy-to-read dashboard. I love the fact that they include efficiency and effectiveness scores (Yes, there is a critical difference between the two). There is some tuning as you learn more about how you use your laptop – but you can’t run away from your own key strokes.

From here you can set take it farther with:

• Setting your own alerts and goals
• Drilling down by time period, application or site
• Comparing one app or site to all others
• Exporting it to Excel
• Making your own widget (I’m not sure when you’d want this, but we are in the widget-age)
• You can also use this for group performance purposes (for a fee)

TechCrunch also reviewed RescueTime and announced some interesting recent aggregate user stats.  There is a RescueTime blog for more tips and ideas.

If management of your career falls more and more on your shoulders, isn’t it nice to have a tool you (and my recruiter) can use? 8~)