Slife: Where Does Your Time Go?

Slife IconHave you ever tried working on your computer, only to discover two hours later that you really haven't done much? I'll admit, I get easily distracted by growl notifications and what not. Wouldn't it be great to know where your time went?

Enter Slife. Slife does one simple thing. It keeps track of how long you've been using each of your applications, and displays that information on a little timeline. Throw in an integrated browser and a tagging system and you've got something good going.

Slife inaction

If you're browsing the web, Slife will save each site you visit, and can give you a preview in its browser window. It will also record instant messages sent in either Adium or iChat. As you can tell, I've been spending most of my evening surfing the web, and not doing very much.

If you think the fun begins and ends inside this app, think again. SlifeLabs has created a social network called SlifeShare, which allows users to share their Slife data. While this is certainly innovative, I'm concerned about privacy issues. Call me paranoid, but I simply don't like the idea of sharing my browsing history with the web.

Slife: Share your life?

There are two things to note. Slife 1.0 currently supports only a dozen or so applications. If it's not on the list, it won't work. Luckily, according to the SlifeLabs blog, Slife 1.1 will provide support for any application. The interface also requires a little time to get used to. Still, a great application nonetheless.

So the next time you exclaim: “Where did my time go?, try Slife. You won't be disappointed. Grab your free copy from SlifeLabs, and tell me what you think.

Comments

9 Responses to “Slife: Where Does Your Time Go?”

  1. Julian on May 2nd, 2007 5:55 pm

    the funny part is in order to check where your time went your actually going to spend some more time reading where it all went, thus losing more time than usual…jkjk lol….sounds kewl…..if you leave it on your computer and let someone sign on adium and chat or let them use your computer for a while you can see everything the did even if they cleared the history..hehe i can see some bad uses for this app;). Good review Marvin Sum.

  2. Miles Evans on May 2nd, 2007 6:00 pm

    Employee management tool anyone? How effective would it be for that I wonder.

    I’ll agree with Julian that the irony of this tool is also brilliant.

  3. Slife, condividi al tua vita digitale « gp on May 3rd, 2007 3:38 am

    [...] condividi al tua vita digitale di Slife ne scrissi un mese e mezzo fa This entry was written by gpessia and posted on Maggio 3, 2007 [...]

  4. darius on May 3rd, 2007 7:19 am

    for my experience ive found that (everyone knows it) most efective thing is to concentrate on one task, leaving other. its usefull tool to begin seeing where sleepless hous gone, but when u start to control yourself u dont need anything. for projects (when client pays hourly wage) i use “project calculator”. its perfect and is already on Tiger :) )) anyways, this looks very good softwareÄž

  5. Marvin Sum on May 3rd, 2007 8:22 am

    @Julian & Miles: You know, I never thought of that. Slife could be used for spying purposes, though I think there would be better apps out there for that.

    Besides, it doesn’t hide itself properly.

    @darius: It helps, but its indirect. I look at Slife at the end of each day to see how I’ve spent my time, and how I can better improve my productivity.

    Knowing where I waste my time helps me be more productive. So in a way, it is indirectly helping.

  6. Mike on May 3rd, 2007 4:14 pm

    Is it just me or is this thing a resource guzzler? My fan goes nuts whenever its on.

  7. pristina.org | everything design » links for 2007-05-04 on May 4th, 2007 8:31 am

    [...] Slife: Where Does Your Time Go? | MacApper onde que meu tempo foi parar? (tags: applications apple time lifehacks) [...]

  8. links for 2007-05-03 | blog.ftofani.com on May 4th, 2007 9:01 am

    [...] Slife: Where Does Your Time Go? | MacApper onde que meu tempo foi parar? (tags: applications apple time lifehacks) [...]

  9. Marvin Sum on May 5th, 2007 5:32 am

    @Mike: That sounds rather odd. On my MacBook, it never goes above 20% of CPU usage and has a fairly small memory footprint (usually less than 30MB).

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