Tuesday, April 1

productivity apps

Do you really wonder, how much time you spend each day browsing Wikipedia ? -or- Lolcats ? Do you want to control the time you spend at Orkut or Facebook ? Yes, you can. There is a Firefox plugin for you at 8AWeek. It adds a toolbar in firefox, with which you can configure which sites you want to restrict and the time you want to spend with restricted sites. And at the end of the day, it produces a graph something like this.

The ones in red color are my restricted sites. It also gives grades based on the how well you group your browsing, % Restricted, and Overtime. My grade report looks like this.

Nah, I am not really proud of that, but I get a feel about what kind of online grazing I do. Now, if you want to expand such an analysis to your desktop - Yes, there is an application for that too. Recuetime is desktop application, that keeps track of the time you spend on each desktop application. Unlike 8AWeek, you have to signup on their website. It gathers information and sends to rescuetime.com servers, where you can analyze the your desktop habit stats. This is how my dashboard looks like.



Of course, there are a lot of options in RescueTime - such as rating your tags, setting up productivity goals, which I haven't explored. Still, I find the application very useful.

I can't say I am productive using these applications, but I can say they have changed the way I work. Now, I no longer wonder, where did all the time go. The answer is right there on these pretty bar charts.