Rize
Started using Rize on March 17 2024. Got a full year subscription on March 19 2024. Let’s try it for a year and remain more focused as Cal Newport suggests. I want to prioritize Deep Work.
Rize s an intelligent time tracker that makes you more productive. It helps you be more in control of your workday and builds better habits by encouraging you to be more focused and more efficient.
We built Rize with a philosophy similar to Cal Newport’s view on productivity—that the value of deep work is becoming both increasingly valuable and rare in our world. To cultivate deep work, we need to understand how our habits affect how much time and attention we spend on our tasks. Only then can we begin to change and improve ourselves.
Rize works to provide you with the critical metrics to understand your current work behaviuor to make habitual changes to be more productive over time. And so, the tool organizes its app into three major categories:
- Track: Track your progress as you work, get a breakdown of your time spent each day, and analyze trends in the time spent on different tasks.
- Focus: Improve the time spent on deep work by quantifying focus time, understanding your interrupters, and how often context switching occurs.
- Habits: Analyze your work activity to get feedback and provide notifications for the right time to take breaks.
Who is Rize for?
Rize is a productivity tool designed for individuals who value time management and seek to enhance their productivity. (Which I am trying to get better at..)
~~It is suitable for marketing managers handling multiple projects, teams, and deadlines; software developers and designers requiring focused time with minimal distractions; and startup founders and entrepreneurs aiming to prioritize their tasks effectively.
Trying it out as a student in tech industry.
How Focus Time is Calculated
Focus time is not equal to all the time you spend in Focus categories. Consider the following two examples:
- You spend 30 minutes in the VSCode app which is categorized as Code. Code is considered a Focus category. This activity will create a Focus Session with a duration of 30 minutes. That will lead your Focus Time to equal 30 minutes and you’ll have 30 minutes of Code in your Categories calculation. Your Focus Time is equal to the time you spent in Focus categories.
- Over an hour, you spend 30 minutes in the VSCode app and 30 minutes in the Slack app, alternating between each app every single minute. Slack is categorized as Messaging which is not considered a Focus category. This activity will not create a Focus Session since you have not reached the necessary Focus categories threshold. That means your Focus Time will be zero. However, you’ll have 30 minutes of Code in your Categories calculation (as well as 30 minutes of Messaging). Your Focus Time is not equal to the time you spent in Focus categories.