Manage Your Time Effectively Online With Slife [Mac Only]

Slife is a free time management and tracking tool for Mac OS X that you can use to visually see what applications that you have running and the length of time that they have been active for. If you want to see what kind of applications you generally have open throughout the day and the amount of time you spend using each application, or you want to set goals, then Slife is the perfect tool.

Slife is also the perfect tool for business professionals who bill their clients by the hour. By monitoring your online time usage of software, you can have a more accurate picture of how much to charge your clients.

Features

Growl Notifications
If you have Growl installed on your Mac then Slife will notify you when you have or haven’t completed activity goals so you can keep up to date with things.

Tracking
When you load up Slife, all the applications that are open will then start being tracked automatically so that you can easily keep track of things. Slife will tell you how long you have had an application open and how long you have had a document or webpage open. If you’re using Safari it will tell you how long you have spent on each webpage and if you are using Microsoft Word then it will tell you how long you have been working on each document.

Within Slife you can choose to view tracking by day, month, application, web and documents, activities and goals.

When tracking by day, dots and lines will show you how much time you have spent on an application. By clicking the dot you will see the document or webpage you were at, how long you spent at the webpage or how long you had a document open for. Each time you switch between different applications dots are created.

When viewing by month, you will see the dots which represent each application by using a different color but you cannot click them and view the information like when viewing by day.

Viewing by ‘Application’ will show you how long you have had Slife open for and what applications you have had open for that period of time by highlighting a grey bar in red.

When viewing by ‘web and documents’ it is displayed by viewing each application but shows how long a document or webpage was open for each application.

When you set activities you can choose which applications you want to be monitored under each activity. The default activities for Slife are checking email, preparing budget, designing web pages, reading news and doing online research. These can be deleted or modified and of course you can create your own. If I was to check my mail using Apple’s Mail application, Slife would monitor how much time I spent checking my email which I could then look at later.

When you create an activity you can set whether it is a goal or not and if you set it to be a goal you can then select whether you want to spend more or less time using certain applications. Once you have completed your goal you will get a notification through Growl telling you that the goal is completed if you have Growl installed.

If you use many applications and have browsed many web pages while Slife has been open then you can use the search function within Slife to see how long you spent on a particular webpage, how long you had a document open or how long you spent within an application.

If you want Slife to stop tracking your use of applications then you can click ‘Private Mode’ within the icon on the menubar and it will stop tracking. To start tracking again just simply press ‘Private Mode’ again and tracking will then resume.

So what do you think of Slife? Do you see yourself using something like this? Or is it more trouble than it’s worth? Think you know something better than Slife? Let’s hear about it….

(By) Wez is a student studying computers, also does programming and video tutorials and writes about technology, software and websites, check out his blog @ www.TheTutorialBlog.com

Filed Under: Cool Software Apps ¦ Mac
Tags: goals, Growl, Mac, productivity, time-tracker