Slife (Premium)

Where did all the hours in the work day go? The productivity app?Slife?(Premium) ($10 per month; free trial available) tries to answer that question, but, to do so, it needs more help from you than it's worth.

Slife records how you spend your time on the computer, breaks it down by application, and generates daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly reports. The problem is Slife doesn't correlate the data it collects into instructive information unless you do a lot of manual work to assign apps to categories. Several other issues weigh down Slife, too, which is simply no competitor to the more effective RescueTime (free to $9 per month), an app with the same intentions, and much more follow through.

Set Up and Features
For Slife to record your computer use, you first need to download and install a small app (5.3MB). This software only collects the data; to see the reports, you have to create an online account at Slifeweb.com. It wasn't clear to me at first that the locally installed app didn't do anything that I could see, and I was confused when launching the "Preferences" from the app (by right clicking on the Slife icon in the Windows dock), which shows only your user name and encrypted password.

Nevertheless, if you install the app and set up a Web account, you can now see how you spend your computer time. Slife records all the different programs and files you use and how long you use them. See the slideshow for examples of the Web interface.

The app needs some time to collect data, so your reports won't reveal anything interesting about your productivity until Slife has been running for a few hours?in theory. But there's still more work that the user has to do for Slife to provide useful information.

Some time-tracking productivity apps automatically assign computer programs to a category. For example, Microsoft Excel is categorized as a business application, whereas TweetDeck falls into the social media category. A good time-tracking app gives you the ability to quickly and easily tell it which of these programs or categories are good or bad for your productivity. RescueTime, for example, lets you mark your three most productive categories, and depending on your job, social media may be one of them. The problem with Slife is you have to set up the entire structure yourself.

Rather than categories, Slife uses "activities," which you can then assign to different programs, so that "business communication" might be the activity assigned to Outlook. You can add a goal for how much time you want to spend doing your activities as well.

In RescueTime, this process takes one step and is largely automated. In Slife, it's a two-step process that's completely manual.

More Limitations
Another major limitation with Slife is that it counts all activity performed in one browser as one chunk of data. In other words, it doesn't parse the time you spent on the Internet by website, so if you spend two hours researching and only 15 minutes messing around on Facebook, Slife reports 2 hours 15 minutes in whatever browser you were using. Considering how many Web apps and sites I use for my daily work?and I would presume the same of other so-called knowledge workers and students?detailed Internet information is key to understanding my productivity. If you need detailed Internet surfing reports, RescueTime does have this feature, thankfully.

When it came to looking at how I spent my time on documents, Slife got a lot of information just wrong. It showed me a Google Chrome browser icon next to "Untitled - Notepad" and "Document1 - Microsoft Word" (that is to say, documents clearly not created in Chrome). I noticed a lot of glitches and imperfect data in this section of the site.

In the main dashboard, a pie chart shows the breakdown of all activity, but only if you assign data to the activities that you may or may not have set up. Again, there's just too much manual work that's needed for Slife to be a productive productivity app.

Worst of all, the Slife Web app logged me out over and over again. While I tested the Web app over several days, I left a tab open in my browser so I could periodically check it. Every time I returned to the app and refreshed the information, Slife logged me out, easily the most frustrating thing about it.

If you need a time-tracking productivity app, try RescueTime, as Slife is more work than it's worth.

More Productivity Software Reviews:
??? Slife (Premium)
??? Google Drive
??? Penultimate (for iPad)
??? Dropbox
??? Notes Plus (for iPad)
?? more

oh the places you ll go blunt amendment justin bieber birthday read across america vikings stadium breitbart dead db cooper