Wednesday, February 11, 2009

You don't want to know

On the Shooting People screenwriters bulletin they have been discussing procrastination.

And methods of dealing with it. And what people procrastinate doing. And so forth.

I have some potentially bad news - there is a brilliant (and free) piece of software available (for Mac and Windows) which will tell you just how much time you spend doing something else.

In fact it was designed for people like me, web developers and other people who do all their work from computers and need to check how much time they are spending on different jobs.

What makes this brilliant is that it keeps track of the applications you're using and the window titles of those applications. Then you tell it which windows belong to which activities. Then it tracks the time on that activity by simply looking at the windows you're using.

It is brilliant and simple.

Plus you can then specify how much, or how little, time you think you should be spending daily on each activity and it will tell you how well you're succeeding. So if you think you should be spending less than 20 minutes a day on writing blogs, you can set it up that way.

You can get it to measure all your writing as a whole, or break it down into separate activities depending on the projects you're working on.

It's still a work in development but I've been using it this afternoon and it's great.

Get it from Slife Labs.

You really didn't want to know about that, did you?



What's on the turntable? "Waking the Witch" by Kate Bush from "Ninth Wave" (the other side of the "Hounds of Love" album)

I haven't written this at work listening to Kate Bush, I've used the clever post-dated posting that Blogger can do.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

No, I didn't. And I certainly don't want you telling my Other Half about that little widget thing.

Delete this post right now.

Mark

Jon said...

"It is brilliant and simple."

I do most of my writing and re-writing on bits of paper- doubt it can sort that out! :)

Adaddinsane said...

Well true, but nothing's perfect. :-)