I think I’ve mentioned before what a shareware/freeware addict I am. I think I called myself a betaholic. Sometimes it is a waste of time, other times it isn’t. For instance, I’ve been using a little program called Rescue Time for a little less than a week and I think it is going to save me time.

You install a small application that sits in your system tray and logs the programs on which you are actively working, then sends it to your online dashboard where your time is visually represented in a graph form. You can “tag” activities and the dashboard will display the tags as a graph as well.

Besides showing me where I was wasting time, this application is helping me keep track of my work hours. I’d been tracking my time with XNote Stopwatch, but often forgot to turn it on when I began working or forgot to pause it when I quit working. Then if the computer crashed or I forgot to save it, I’d lose my log of time. Now that I have tagged my applications and websites that I use exclusively for work as “work” I can get a pretty good idea how much time I spent actually working on tasks for my job.

Rescue Time is still in Beta and invitation only, but I got an invitation only a few days or so after signing up. I was worried that I’d discover that I wasted my time more than I do, so perhaps I am not such a slacker after all!