Where does your computer time go?

This is a guest post by Gaetano Caruana from Fruitful Time.
If you spend a big chunk of your day sitting in front of a computer and you wonder where you spent your time, keep on reading. We’ve all been through it. A whole day goes by and we start wondering: what did I do today?

We cannot keep track of every minute so a virtual helping hand is required to automatically track our computer time. FruitfulTime have just launched FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter, an automatic time tracking application that runs in the background to keep detailed and accurate records of all the activities you carry out on the computer.

FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter tracks the application you are working on, i.e. the one you are interacting with, and records the application name, window title and web address if available, along with current time and duration.

You can then launch the FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter dashboard, which loads in your default browser, to view visual reports showing your activity levels per day and per hour. The dashboard also shows the top applications, top websites and top tags. More about tags later on.

You can view these reports for specific days, weeks, months, or custom periods, as well as filtering out certain hours or weekends, for instance. Furthermore, the graphs can be clicked on to drill down on a specific time, application or website.

FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter runs completely locally, therefore all of the information is stored locally and nothing is shared over the internet. To display the reports FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter uses a small lightweight web server which is installed on your machine as part of the installation.

The fact that FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter runs completely locally offers you peace of mind since you do not need to share your daily activities with third parties.

Another powerful feature of FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter is tagging. Tagging works like Gmail labels but instead of labelling emails, you tag applications, websites and window titles with tags. So for instance, you can tag Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome with the tag browsing. Another example might be tagging Mozilla Thunderbird and gmail.google.com with the tag email.
The dashboard will then display the top tags graph so you will know whether you spend more time on browsing or email, for example. Tagging can also be used to view time slice graphs and to generate automatic timesheets, which can be very accurate especially if you tag window titles.

With so many things to do and a thousand distractions available only a click away, it is very easy to lose focus and get carried away into another marathon web browsing session. With FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter you will know exactly where you spend your time and can therefore take action to improve your activities. This will improve your productivity dramatically. As they say, you can only improve what you measure. So if you want to boost your productivity you first need to find out on what stuff you spend your time.

The good news is that FruitfulTime ProductivityMeter Personal Edition is FREE for personal use and so you can download your own copy now to start tracking your time.