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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!