Services to help us stop dawdling online

Welcome to a new week; heck, welcome to a whole new month! And what better time than Monday morning for procrastinating by reading about ways to stop procrastinating?

Over at the WSJ, they put up a very comprehensive review of four different time-tracking systems. Since anti-procrastination (is that even a word?) is a bit of a hobby of mine, I have actually used three of those systems myself:

I was one of the early beta testers for sLife Labs when it came to Windows (it was Mac-only at first); I've used RescueTime since waaaay back when they didn't even have a Pro plan yet and it was still worth something even without paying; and finally I've started using ManicTime (which we've covered before) several months ago on both of my machines. I've even corresponded with the ManicTime developers, who were quite difficult to get a hold of, but once I managed, they were super-nice and helpful about my problem with ManicTime crashing Windows 7 x64. It works perfectly now.

You can go ahead and read the WSJ article -- it's quite nice, of course. The only problem with it is that they evaluated each of these systems just for that -- to evaluate it. That's not really the best way, I'm afraid. A time tracking system takes time to evaluate.

My personal take on the topic: RescueTime is very nice but the free version is practically worthless. I never did get sLife Labs -- I guess that's a personal thing, though. Maybe Mac users get it. For me, after approximately two years of using one or another time tracking solution, ManicTime is the clear-cut winner To see why, continue reading after the jump.

So what's so good about ManicTime? Why the excitement? Did they pay me off just like TheSixtyOne guys did?
Well, of course they did. But apart from that, here's what's so great about ManicTime:

• It's offline. I'm not sending my computer usage data to anyone.
• It has a nice UI that I can actually understand. That's subjective, I know, but it's actually one of the main reasons I like it so much. I can see my day at a glance -- what did I do today at 10:03? Snap, here's the answer (no, I'm not telling).
• It's free! Actually, the one thing I still don't get about it is what's their business model. If anyone has any idea how these guys plan to make money, feel free to let us know in the comments.
• Data export is pretty quick and easy.

One of the only bad things about it is that it's a massive memory hog. It takes up 120MB of RAM on my system (!!!). That's pretty insane. And that's just minutes after launching it -- not a memory leak. But to me, tracking my computer usage is worth the RAM.

One thing they never mentioned on the WSJ is how to stay on track, but that's a whole different discussion I guess. One which LeechBlock wins hands down with no competition whatsoever.

Tags: productivity, timetracking, tools, zukerlist