Slife Offers Analytics For Your Desktop

I’m always interested in tools that will make me more productive, so when the makers of Slife invited me to try it out, I hot footed it to the website to download the client software. Available for both Mac and PC, this software offers activity analytics so you can see where you are spending your time. There’s nothing to configure, just download and install it and it starts tracking what you do.

Slife offers a number of ways of looking at your data, called visualizations. The ‘day’ view shows you the applications that you have been using and the time you have spent on them set out in an hourly grid (GANNT chart style). You can pull a slider at the bottom of the window and hover over the little dots for more information. This worked well for Firefox, where it could identify how long I had spent on each site, and for Microsoft Word, where it listed each document by name. However it wasn’t as good at tracking my Google Chrome tabs or my OpenOffice documents.

The ‘Applications’ view shows you a bar chart of how long you have spent on each application this month, while the ‘Web and documents’ tab lists the sites you have visited and documents opened this month. This list seemed incomplete to me. You can also define activities such as reading email in the preferences and associate them with certain sites. You can use these as the basis for setting goals too.

I think this application has a lot of potential. While I still prefer RescueTime, Slife is a winner because you don’t need to set anything up to get useful data. It’s free for personal use, though there is also a teams version available for a monthly subscription.

Tags: productivity, rescuetime, Reviews, Software

Add-On Of The Week: RTM For Gmail

As you know, I’m on a mission to improve productivity. That’s why last week’s featured add-on, GTD Inbox, was so useful. That gave me a way of managing my email, but I still needed something more - a task list. And I got one, with Remember The Milk For Gmail. This add-on really rocks.

You’ll need a Remember The Milk account to get started. It’s free and it only takes a couple of seconds to get started. Once you’ve signed up, head over the the RTM for Gmail page and download and install the Firefox extension. Restart and you’ll see a handy task list next to your inbox messages in the right sidebar. This only appears in the list view, but disappears when you look at individual emails.

Right at the top is a box where you can enter your task (such as ‘online meeting tomorrow’) and then it is immediately put in the right place (today, tomorrow, this week, next week, later or anytime). Hover your mouse over a task to get a box where you can change the priority, the list it appears in, the location, the tags and so on. You can also easily mark a task complete, postpone it or delete it. All of this synchronizes seamlessly with your Remember The Milk account.

I love using this extension. When I log into my email I get an at-a-glance view of my tasks and goals for the day. I feel organized, which is half the battle. As well as the Firefox extension, Remember The Milk also works with a number of other services, including Twitter.

Tags: add-ons, firefox, gtd, productivity

Time Tracking With RescueTime

Working on the web is all about productivity, but how do you know when you’re really being productive? One of the best tools I have found for assessing productivity is RescueTime. It’s a system tray application that quietly monitors the applications you use and the sites that you visit. It integrates with the RescueTime website, where you can do all sorts of fun things with the data that you have collected.

For example, you can:

• Categorize your activity. In fact RescueTime has created some automatic categories for regularly used sites and applications, so IM and email apps, Office apps and sites such as Twitter will be put into the right categories. You can also choose from a list of suggested categories.
• Tag your activity. If categories are the headlines, tags are the sub-headings. Just as on other sites, tagging allows you to identify certain activities in a way that’s useful to you. For example, two of my tags are blog writing and writing, so I can distinguish between blogging and the writing I do for clients.
• Classify your activity. Some of the things we do online are productive, like actvities that relate to our jobs. Others may be for fun, such as interactions on social sites. With RescueTime you can classify your activities according to how productive they are, resulting in a neat little statistic on your dashboard page.

If you’re thinking about using RescueTime, then you’re probably into stats, so you will be pleased to know that there are loads of charts on your webpage, highlighting the time you spend online and the main categories, tags, apps and sites you use. If you’re anything like me, you’ll get a few surprises about how you spend your time.

You can also set goals for how much or how little time you spend on activities and receive email and SMS alerts about your progress. I’ve only scratched the surface of this useful tool, but check out the RescueTime blog for more details on recent and forthcoming features.

Tags: apps, productivity, Reviews