It’s My Slife!
Posted in Websites or Tools
Lately there has been a fair amount of chatter within the office concerning how to more efficiently spend our time on projects. Given that most of the time the best place to start when solving a problem is learning more about what is causing the problem, we’ve unearthed a couple of tools that aim to help us better manage our time and to-do lists.
The first application is Things. The basic idea here is that you have things to do and you generally schedule them into stuff that has to be done today or very soon, and other things that can be done some time in the future but aren’t that urgent. This idea isn’t anything particularly new but the way that it integrates with mail and mobile devices is great. It’s free for the time being so give it a try.
The second application that I found just today is called Slife. It records what you do in a stack of different applications and then gives you a report as to how much time you spent in an application and what you were doing. For instance it can tell you that you spent 2 hours today in Firefox, however it can also tell you at what times you were in Firefox, for how long you were in there and even the name of the tab you had open. You can group applications into ‘activities’ and then set goals for these activities such as “read email for less than 10 minutes per day” or “do work for more than 5 hours a day” and so on. Again, this application is free.
So if you own a Mac and are looking to spot any innefficiencies in your working habits or to improve the way you handle your to-dos then check these applications out!
fitzy
Oct 16, 2008
I will definitely test out Slife. It sounds very good for tracking how much time I spend answering emails during the day.
I’m still coming to grips with Things, but I think I see a place for it in the way I work. The integration between iPhone, iCal and Mail is very thorough. It’s nice to be able to hide things you don’t want to do when you change your mind, but know that you can easily bring them back if need be.
mlambie
Oct 16, 2008
I’ve been listening to the older 43 Folders podcasts with Merlin Mann. It’s re-motivated me to finish reading David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”, upon which I think a lot of these modern productivity applications and philosophies have been based.
Who else sees the irony in my buying GTD when I was in the States (what’s that, 3 years ago?) and only getting a third the way through it before something else got my attention?
James
Oct 16, 2008
I’ve been using Things on my desktop, and iPhone for several months now, I think its great so far even though its in BETA.
Prefer it to the “To Do” feature in Mail (Things Syncs with this anyway) since it forces me to open Things and plan out what I need to do based on projects and then the tasks within each project.
I think you can also setup contacts/teammates to send tasks to and from via email, I haven’t tested this feature out as yet though.
P.s You’re welcome for the tip-off about Things Fitzy :)