Slife for Nonprofits
Slife keeps you accountable with your time
Whether you just started a nonprofit or are a seasoned pro, your time is important. Many working for or running a nonprofit are their own boss. Something catches your eye during the day on a blog (hopefully this one) or what was supposed to be a quick task takes you spinning into the timeless abyss. Before you know it 5:00pm rolls around and you barely accomplished anything during the day. Knowing where you time goes and how to prevent it is where Slife comes in. Whether you work on a Mac or PC Slife can help you track where your time went and put help in place to keep you focused. See the post below via Smoking Apples for the scoop.
While getting things done applications are fine for single tasks, when it comes to the broader “tasks”, like avoiding certain habits, or making new ones is a bit out of a GTD’s reach. We’ve already talked about Habits on the iPhone, but even that needs to be launched and sometimes, you just don’t do it.
When I first launched Slife, I didn’t know what to make of it. So I left it in the dock thinking I’ll figure it out later. After a while, after twittering for a bunch and surfing tech websites, I came back to Slife to find that something had changed. There were little dots in a couple of boxes. These dots were mainly constricted to EventBox and Safari. Wow! Without any user interaction, Slife had basically tracked my usage habits.
Tracking your steps
So I went in deeper, and found out a bit more about its functionality. From the preferences, you can disable tracking certain applications to protect privacy or just keep things simple. The most used applications stay at the top of the charts, going down below to those least used. Applications are automatically added to the main chart with usage data tracked without any manual settings.
Restraining or grooming habits
Now while tracking your activities and showing it to you in a graph is fine, Slife can help you control your habits. For instance, I noticed that I use Twitter far too much for it to be healthy (we all do!). So I set a goal for myself. Using the Activities tab, I added a new activity €œtwitterring and assigned the applications EventBox to it. I set the goal at less than x minutes per day.
Now how did I determine x minutes? By looking at the Applications tab, I get a graphical view of my usage statistics of each application per day. So I noticed that I use EventBox for xx minutes, and I wanted to bring it down to x minutes.
Activities can be anything from applications, to documents, to web pages. You could even have activities where you want to spend a minimum amount of time per day, for instance, writing posts on Smoking Apples. If I wanted to spend x hours on writing posts on SA, I could add certain websites to the activity, and whenever Slife detects that I’m actively using that website, it will add it to the writing posts activity. You can also tell EventBox when you are performing an activity from the menubar, so then no matter what you are doing, it will be counted for that activity.
Collaborative tracking
A collaborative feature, Slife Teams is an online based program for tracking multiple people in a single database. A small company could for instance set up a Slife Team for their coding team to see how much those guys are actually spending on coding. Of course, this is a team effort, since one can always hit the private mode button and nothing will be tracked. Productivity, is in the user’s hand. Teams is currently in a private beta so you will need to get approved for the program before jumping in.
It’s the good Slife
The best part of Slife is it’s non intrusive nature. There is very little to set up, and you only see it when you want to see. Idling in the background, Slife will hardly even use a few megabytes of your memory. The best part of Slife, is that it is completely free. For those interested in the team feature will be happy to know that there is also a Windows version. The Mac version however feels completely native, written in Cocoa, so you should feel right at home with it.
I would recommend this app to anyone using a computer. Even if you aren’t interested in reprogramming your habits, it is nice to give a glance at how you use your computer. There is nothing to set up, nothing to manage. Slife is a totally different idea from the apps we’ve seen so far, and is really good at what it does. And all you have to do is watch!
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