Selcuk Demirel

Even after spending hours behind a computer screen, we're often surprised by how little we get done during a workday.

Indeed, frittering time away is epidemic in the office: A 2007 survey of 2,000 workers from Inc., a Web site that provides compensation data, found that Americans waste about 20% of their time at work; with 34.7% of those surveyed saying surfing the Internet is the biggest distraction.


Some services record and categorize users' computer activities—often allowing workers to classify chunks of time as either productive or unproductive. Other services operate by having users set goals for how much they'll get done in a set period of time.


"Multi-tasking is a complete myth," says Peter Bregman, a time-management expert and chief executive of Bregman Partners Inc., a management-consulting company. "We lose time in the switch from one task to another," since it takes time for the brain to adjust to each project.




But we thought some of the category titles—such as "Business"—were a bit vague. "We're still chipping away to distill this stuff into something actionable," says RescueTime's Mr. Wright. We liked the feature that let us designate individual sites and applications as productive or unproductive. Additionally, each time our computer was idle and we returned to our desk we were prompted to say whether our task away from the computer was work related, like a phone call, or something that shouldn't be recorded, like a trip to the fridge for a snack.


Overall, the service helped us get more tasks done because setting goals required us to think through how we would build our days' work. Tasks can be broken up into subcategories, making larger projects seem more manageable. But it was a bit of a pain to remember to notify the service every time we stopped and started a task. And even when we did make sure to mark our stop time, the service sometimes didn't register it, making our data inaccurate. Rob McKeown, co-founder of Mcgraphix Inc., which developed Klok, says this issue will be resolved in the next version.


During one particularly unproductive day, the service showed us that we spent 22 minutes on Twitter, 40 minutes on Facebook and almost three hours on email. There was also a "private" mode that turned the tracking function off, allowing us to browse frivolous stuff guilt-free.


ManicTime, a desktop program that only runs on Windows systems, was next. Our computer usage was tracked with line and bar graphs; we could color code activities and tags to better understand how we spent our time. That made it clear that email was our biggest time waster. (Though the service doesn't distinguish between work and non-work related emails.)


All in all, the services really helped us get a handle on how we spend our work time. And having a written account of where our minutes went pushed us to modify our work habits—and get more done. The guilt element was motivating, too: Just knowing that the length of our Facebook session was going to be recorded made us think twice about lingering


$5 per month; Mac, Windows, Internet needed. Web site tracking; categorizes activities; allows additional notes; displays activities with graphs. Need credit card for sign-up; "private" mode for non-work-related use helped us more accurately measure work time.
RescueTime Pro



Free download; Windows, Mac, Internet not needed Can drag tasks onto calendar; tasks have subcategories so can be easily broken down into manageable pieces; doesn't track the Web sites you've visited. Simple organization; It was tough to notify the service that we had stopped a task.

Write to Alina Dizik at