I saw SlimTimer awhile ago when my wife was using it in her Graphic Design department. Just today I decided I wanted to track how much time I spent on my various tasks. I wanted to do this for various reasons. Partly just to better understand how I spend my time at work, and also so I have something to tell my boss when he asks what I’ve been doing all day. ;-)
SlimTimer is a seriously great little piece of software.
- The UI is, frankly, as close to perfect as I can imagine for a tool like this. Once you read the four or five bullet points that make up the “How to use” page, the learning curve is practically non-existent. You just use it, and it just works.
- It’s built with Ruby on Rails! That doesn’t mean anything to the user, who probably doesn’t care what it’s built on, but I thought that was cool.
- It’s totally free. (!)
- You can run reports on how you spend your time, and these are pretty configurable, too. You can even export them to CSV if you like, so you can show your manager how busy you’ve been. ;)
This is a great tool. If you work near enough to computers to keep a tool like this up-to-date, and if you’re interested in knowing exactly how much time you spend on which tasks, I highly recommend it.
