Find out just how long you spend (waste) on email with Chrometa

I recently got a licence to a superb program called Chrometa. It’s an awesome piece of kit that sits in your systray and monitors which apps you are using and for how long. Why? well, so you can become more productive! (and you can export geeky stats for how long you spend tweeting)

50% of work is play when you work at home

Now I never believed that when I heard it, so much so that I’ve completely forgotten where I did hear it but, it turns out to be (more or less) true!

I had the Chrometa app merrily running away in the taskbar all day, every day this week and would periodically spend some time dragging and dropping the recorded entries into their appropriate folders. I tend to work on 4 or 5 different things at the same time so it was nice to be able to have folders for the different projects and then subdivide them into coding, research, communication etc

At the end of each day I went into the folders and used the export to excel function (which I can see would be a nifty way of speeding up the billing process if/when I work with clients code) and I was dumbfounded to find that a huge amount of my time wasn’t spent in the IDE for coding or on technically named websites in the name of research, but on bleedin twitter and personal email!

A quick tour

A time and place for everything

I have now banished myself from email reading/sending/receiving from right after I do my morning catchup until an hour before I’m due to finish my geek job and go downstairs to my Chinese takeout job. Just doing this one change to my daily work schedule has made me so much more productive!

Get a life, get Chrometa!

I can see more and more things that I can change to make myself more productive and it’s all down to the wonder of Chrometa, you can get a free 30 day trial below. BTW.. this is not a paid review or a chance to show you an affiliate link, I just love this, it’s the best time tracking app!

Download a free 30 day trial of the best time tracking tool here