Slife: Where Does Your Time Go?

Posted by Marvin Sum on 05/2/07 in Home & Personal, Organization, Productivity

Slife Icon Have you ever tried working on your computer, only to discover two hours later that you really havenâ€™t done much? Iâ€™ll admit, I get easily distracted by growl notifications and what not. Wouldnâ€™t it be great to know where your time went?

Enter Slife. Slife does one simple thing. It keeps track of how long youâ€™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 youâ€™ve got something good going.

Slife inaction

If youâ€™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, Iâ€™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, Iâ€™m concerned about privacy issues. Call me paranoid, but I simply donâ€™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 itâ€™s not on the list, it wonâ€™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: â€œWhere did my time go?â€, try Slife. You wonâ€™t be disappointed. Grab your free copy from SlifeLabs, and tell me what you think.

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6 Comment(s)

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Julian said on

May 2nd, 2007 at 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.

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Miles Evans said on

May 2nd, 2007 at 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.

darius said on

May 3rd, 2007 at 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 softwareÄ„

Marvin Sum said on

May 3rd, 2007 at 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.

Mike said on

May 3rd, 2007 at 4:14 pm

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

Marvin Sum said on

May 5th, 2007 at 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).