How To Be More Productive On The Computer

Ever wonder how much time you spend on the computer being productive? Or how to be more productive while on the computer? Now you can analyze your time spent on the computer without much work at all. All you need to do is install one of the following applications – FruitfulTime Productivity Meter (Windows only currently) or Slife (Windows and Mac).

Both applications are very nice and easy to use.  What they do is track your computer usage and display how much time you spend in each application, each web page/web site, your active time vs your idle time, etc.  They both display the data in easy-to-read and understand formats generally in the form of pie and bar graphs.

One of the features that FruitfulTime’s application has which I liked was the ability to create tags and categorize websites, applications, etc. The tags allow you to simply track applications or websites based on type. For example, you could create an Internet Applications tag and stick your web browser, email, IM client, etc. under that tag and see how much time you spend on those applications vs Microsoft Office.

On the other hand Slife has a feature called Goals which allows you to create a goal-based system for different activities such as checking your email, surfing the web, etc. For example, you can create a goal which says you want to spend less than 30 minutes checking your email a day.

Slife is completely free, FruitfulTime is free for personal use, however, it disables one of the features called TimeSheets after 30 days if you decide not to pay for a license.

Both applications have some nice functionality and are definitely fun to play with to see actually how much time you waste away on your computer.