Tracking Your Time with Slife

I've always struggled to account for the time I spend on both personal and client projects. It's usually been a guessing game because I'm simply not focused enough to track my time very effectively. Some days I multi-task, while other days I wake up and dig into a project because I know there's a paycheck waiting when I'm done.

In the past, I've tried a few other time keeping and management software, but I eventually abandoned them because they were either too time consuming to set up and maintain or they were too lacking in what I specifically needed.

Well this past week, Slife Labs (http://www.slifelabs.com/) released version 2 of its time management software, Slife, that I'm finding pretty useful for my needs.

This free software automatically keeps track of time spent on individual applications, web pages and documents on your computer. There's little to set up and it does its job pretty much behind the scenes. You can set how much idle time runs before Slife stops tracking your usage in individual applications and documents.

The graphic interface of Slife is simple and straightforward. Slife includes four different data reports for how you spend time on your computer. My favorite views of reports are by Applications and by Web & Documents. I can finally see how much time I'm actually spending in my most often used applications like Aperture, Photoshop, and of course the Web. (By the way, it would be super great if Slife Lab or some other developer could somehow make a plug-in for applications like Aperture whereby time tracking can be kept for individual projects that exist only within the application itself.)

You can determine which applications can be monitored by Slife and there's a Private Mode that you can turn on and off that stops Slife from clocking the time you use say surfing the net or particular web pages. So far example, if I work on this review off and on for a few days at a time, I can click the Month view and get total of how much time I spent writing this review. I can also get a tally of say how much time I used in Photoshop on individual files. While this feature works pretty great, I would like to be able to simply click on a particular document listed in Slife in order to get total time spent over several days, instead performing a search.

Also, I'm surprised that there's no way to print out time reports or export data to a spread sheet. Invoices also can't be created from Slife. I'm sure, however, these more advanced features will added in future releases.

There are a few other goal setting features that might be useful as well. You can set goals for how much time you want to spend in various applications, but you can't as far as I can tell set goals for how much time you want to spend on individual documents.

While Slife is pretty easy to figure out in terms of usage, Slife Lab provides a video tutorial on its website to get you up and running. There's much to be desired in this application, but it's well worth downloading, using, and watching for future releases. As the application matures, it will be well worth a purchase, especially if your time is indeed money.