You can also add labels to specify your activity even further, such as detailing what kind of research is being done.ĭuring one particularly unproductive day, the service showed us that we spent 22 minutes on Twitter, 40 minutes on Facebook and almost three hours on email. The software lets users customize their own categories, such as news or research. Clicking on the icon took us to various time-management graphs, which were easy to read. (A redesign will soon enable users to log on without one, saysįounder of Atlanta-based Slife Labs LLC.) After a quick download, we could see an icon on our task bar. To sign up for the trial, however, we had to provide a credit-card number. The service costs $5 per month, but a 30-day trial is free. And even when we did make sure to mark our stop time, the service sometimes didn't register it, making our data inaccurate.Ĭo-founder of Mcgraphix Inc., which developed Klok, says this issue will be resolved in the next version. But it was a bit of a pain to remember to notify the service every time we stopped and started a task. Tasks can be broken up into subcategories, making larger projects seem more manageable. Overall, the service helped us get more tasks done because setting goals required us to think through how we would build our days' work. We also realized we did far fewer tasks than anticipated each day. One morning, for example, we saw that a writing assignment took 3½-hours instead of the two we thought it should. Then users note when they start and stop each project, making it easy to compare your goals to reality. Instead, it asks users to set tasks for themselves throughout the day to help manage projects. Klok doesn't automatically track what you do on the computer (so no Internet connection is required). Additionally, each time our computer was idle and we returned to our desk we were prompted to say whether our task away from the computer was work related, like a phone call, or something that shouldn't be recorded, like a trip to the fridge for a snack. We liked the feature that let us designate individual sites and applications as productive or unproductive. "We're still chipping away to distill this stuff into something actionable," says RescueTime's Mr. Some of the findings were surprising: When looking at the day's graph on a random Friday, for example, we realized we spent about 10 minutes of every hour reading the news.īut we thought some of the category titles-such as "Business"-were a bit vague. The site recorded our activities accurately, assigned them to categories and put them into graphs. ![]() ![]() But the services themselves required some upkeep-which, ironically, took time away from our work.Īfter signing up for a free two-week trial of RescueTime Pro (usually $5.30 per month), the software downloaded quickly and showed up on our task bar. We also found that just knowing our activities were being watched made us a bit less likely to dawdle on non-work-related sites. Each site provided an eye-opening look at our workday without too much of a hassle. ![]() To track our productivity, we tested four online services for a week each: RescueTime, Slife, Klok and ManicTime. Users to the site visit an average of 57 Web sites or applications per day, he says. Wright found that RescueTime users switch to an instant message window 71 times per day, which means every 5.2 minutes or 11.5 times per hour. "We lose time in the switch from one task to another," since it takes time for the brain to adjust to each project.Ĭo-founder of Seattle-based RescueTime Inc., a time-tracking software company, agrees. "Multi-tasking is a complete myth," says Peter Bregman, a time-management expert and chief executive of Bregman Partners Inc., a management-consulting company. While it is easy to see how hours spent on YouTube or Facebook can crush your productivity, time-management experts say one of the biggest culprits is the constant transitioning from one computer-based task to another.
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