This is a guest post from Rebecca Laffar-Smith.

Your day is comprised of exactly 24 hours. If you spend even a fraction of those hours online you might surf numerous websites, check your email a dozen times, chat to a friend on yahoo, watch a movie, listen to music, work on a project, write a document, etc. How much of the time you are at your computer is productive? Where does that time go?

Once installed, Rescue Time sits quietly in the notification area of your task bar, stealthy as a ninja, watching and recording your computer usage. You can forget it is there except those times when you are analyzing your results. It will continue to do its job, as you continue to do yours.

1. Constant computer usage tracking

Pro: Rescue Time knows what you’re working on. It tracks the time you spend on various Applications and Websites. See which programs you use most frequently. Examine which projects consume most of your time. This information can help you increase your productivity and reduce time spent on unnecessary tasks.

Con: The most serious limitation to Rescue Time is that it can only track the time I’m at the computer. When will they invent a device that tracks how much time I spend doing chores, spending time with the family, or sleeping?

2. Depth of information

Pro: You can see the time you’ve been at the keys with detailed records of your usage by day, week, month, year, and all time. Each application is listed with a breakdown of not only how much time you’ve put into that project but exactly which hours of the day were involved.

Con: The information provided by Rescue Time is a little shallow. It’s excellent for telling me which websites or applications I’ve been using but not what I’ve been viewing on them. The tool would be even more useful if it showed specific page information inside domain names, file names inside applications, and contact names on messenger and email services.

3. Tag activities with your keywords

Pro: You can tag each of your applications and websites with the keywords of your choice. Is a particular website a part of a specific project? Tag it! Do you have a few favorite games? They can be group with a single ‘games’ tag. Tag your usage to your own liking.

Con: The lack of depth prevents these tags from reaching their full potential. For example, if you’ve spent time in Microsoft Word some of it might have been business related, other personal, without additional depth there is no way to tag the difference.

4. Goals, alarms & alerts!

Pro: With the handy Goals aspect you can set specific time expectations or limits on your activities. Have your Rescue Time Goals sent via RSS, Email, or SMS so you can see exactly how you’re progressing with your goals.

Con: If they’ll send alerts via RSS, Email, and SMS why can’t they simply have Rescue Time give us a pop up alert box direct to our screen?

5. Clever widgets & developing API

Pro: Rescue Time Widgets allow you to access and share your details from your desktop or blog. They are also currently developing an API to allow developers to create new applications and widgets for greater diversity. This creates a fantastic opportunity to grow and develop based on what users truly want in an application like this.

Con: One thing Rescue Time does not have a Windows Vista sidebar widget. I’d like to be able to see my stats from my desktop rather than logging into the website and the current web-dependency reduces the usefulness of Rescue Time as a time management tool. Storing data online has become a common and preferred means but Rescue Time would truly benefit from an ability to have offline access to the same information.

Rescue Time is a fantastic time management tool. Used effectively it can increase productivity, reduce ineffective work habits, and tantalize statistic lovers. Discover exactly how you user your computer time, track the websites you frequent, evaluate the value of your software, and maximize your efficiency.

Rebecca Laffar-Smith is a freelance writer, editor, and web tech. Her blog, The Writer’s Round-About discusses various aspects of online freelance business. Subscribe to The Writer’s Round-About via RSS or email!

Since I posted my review of Todoist, I’ve been using it a great deal. There are some very good reasons to use this tool.

Combining several lists into one.

Whether it’s work for my day job, my three blogs, Injader, or Entrecard, it’s all in the list. I can use projects and sub-projects to split up the work. This is far better than my previous mess of Word documents, text files and notepaper.

I have even used Todoist to replace Eventum, an issue tracking package that I had started to use for Injader. It was taking so long to get everything into the system that I stopped doing it. On Sunday night, I sat down for a couple of hours, typed all of the remaining changes for Injader from my paperwork, and copied everything across from Eventum.

This is a massive benefit to me. Now I can keep track of everything, no matter which computer I’m on, or which project I’m tackling.

Breaking down large projects.

I’m going to look at this in a future post, but for now, I’ll just say that Todoist is starting to help me get stuck into larger projects with greater confidence. This is an unexpected bonus and something I’ve struggled with in the past. Previously, I’d get the projects done, but not without significant hassle and stress.

Scheduling your life.

I wouldn’t consider Todoist as a “lifestyle tool”, but when so much of my life involves working, it’s extremely important to manage my workload and keep on top of all the new and existing changes I’ve got to do.

Even when you have your fingers in as many pies as I do (and yes, I do like pie), Todoist allows you to see what needs doing on any given day or within the next few days across all that you do. This allows you to stay focused, stay motivated, and stay in control of your work.

Tools are important.

Using tools are an important part of our working lives. If you work from home - especially if you work for a small company, or you’re self-employed - you may need to find and evaluate your own tools. Todoist is a perfect starting point for anyone who needs to keep track of several different streams of work at once, or even just several to-do items on a single job. It’s highly effective, and is a recommended tool for Zen Workers.

• Give Todoist a try.

Todoist: much todo about nothing?

Thanks to fragileheart for suggesting this tool.

I’m a very organised person, but right now, my to-do lists are a complete mess. The list for my day job uses my tips for writing a great to-do list, but my other lists are all over the place. I have an online issue tracker for Injader changes, along with bits of paper, emails, text files, Word documents, the list goes on and on. Far too many things that I just keep losing track of.

To restore some order, I’ve decided to give Todoist a whirl. It’s a free tool that allows you to manage your work effectively. First you register and sign in, then you start adding projects. These are used for organising your tasks. Key features include: sub-projects, priorities, due dates, task schedule, task search, plus a few other things I probably haven’t found yet.

Some things I already like (bear in mind this is only after 30 minutes of use):

1. Adding projects, sub-projects and tasks is really quick and easy.
2. Shortcuts for setting event dates - such as “tomorrow”, or “next tue” - very handy indeed.
3. Collapsing projects is handy for when I don’t want to show you my private work
4. It’s a small thing, but I like the numbers that show me how many tasks I’ve got in a project, and I also like the way they add up when you collapse a project.
5. There’s optional Gmail / Firefox integration. Haven’t used it yet but it’s good to have!

Some things I would like to see:

1. Some better colours would be nice, or more of them. This is also a problem with labels in Gmail. Let me use a proper colour picker, and I’ll be much happier!
2. Better use of priorities, as right now they aren’t useful enough. I can view ALL priority 1 items, but not all priority 1 items in a specific project, and when viewing a project I can’t sort the items by priority. With Injader, dates aren’t really relevant, it’s all about the priorities.
3. I’d like to be able to drag an item to the left or the right as well as up and down. Reordering projects is handy, as is the way you can make a sub-project by indenting it, but it’s quite tricky if you want to do both.
4. Not so much a request, more of a small annoyance. Some of the shortcuts are weird and override standard functions. e.g. I often use CTRL + cursor left or right to jump between words. When adding a task or a project, I can’t do this because the same key combination is used to indent or outdent items.
5. The “add above” / “add below” terminology is confusing. Adding a project above or below the current item puts it at the same level, which kind of makes sense, except I thought it would actually make it a sub-project - so it appears at the level below the current item. An option to add a sub-project beneath the current project would help instead of having to add then indent it.

Overall, I think Todoist is a really handy application, and I’m going to try using it to see if it’s a suitable replacement for my existing methods.

Have you tried Todoist? What do you like about it? What would you change?