How to Watch Yourself Work and Address any Productivity Flaws

by Rico on May 22nd, 2008

Once upon a time, Darren Rowse recorded a video of himself working in front of a computer, shrank it down into a digestable 2-minute video, and posted it on problogger.net. I really can’t remember where the post is, but remembering this gave me an idea: could recording ourselves show how productive we are?

The Setup

There are three ways to do record your activity for the entire work day:

Video camera. Pretty straightforward: record yourself working, upload the video on your computer.
Webcam. Whether your webcam is built into your computer or not, you can use it to record videos too. Make sure it can record videos that are hours long though!
Screencast Software. Screencast software records what’s happening on your computer screen. This sounds like the best option: you really get to see how productive you are during the workday, as some of us look the same while typing out a report or playing that game.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure you have enough space for the recording! Expect to use at least one megabyte per minute (which adds up to at least 480MB if you’ll be recording for eight hours); make sure you record in a format that’s readable by whatever editor you’ll be using (see below).

The Process

Once you’ve gotten everything set up, make sure to start recording before you get down to business. Just go about your normal workday, and try to forget that you working under “observation”.

When you’re done for the day, stop recording. Now you’ll need to shrink the video down into 2-5 minutes, unless you’re ok with spending 8 more hours analyzing yourself. Check out this list of free video editing software platforms; most Windows PCs already have Windows Movie Maker, while Macs have iMovie.

The Analysis

Now that you’ve condensed your workday into a few minutes, take a look! You can identify the times when you were less productive, why, and what you can do improve. Remember, it’s not about working the entire 8 hours. Rather, it’s how well you focus when you decide to work. Are you easily distracted? Does it take you a while to finish simple tasks? The video will show you.

Pro athletes look at videos of their performance, to find out what their weaknesses and what they can do to address them. I don’t see why freelancers shouldn’t do the same. Who knows, the productivity insights gained by this exercise could be so simple yet effective, you’ll end up wondering why you didn’t think of them in the first place.

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