Recently active topics in Slife Labs

A question was posed here about tracking meetings, but I thought I'd expand upon that. I'd love to see the ability to track physical activities. One way this could work is by bringing up a dialog after a configurable period of idleness. When the user returns this dialog could ask if they would like to track any of the time spent away from their desk. They could assign an activity to this time, enter a brief description, and choose an amount of time to attribute to the activity. That would be great to cover things like research (with books!), manual work (physical mockups, etc.), and of course, meetings.

remove slife from the dock, and leave it in the menu bar?

When looking at the "Web & Docoments" view, please drag & drop the documents to activities in the sidebar, and remember to associate those documents with that task in the future. That way we can organize what we've done even if we've already done it.

The biggest feature lacking I think is a formal notion of clients. While it's possible to define clients with activities, it's especially difficult to do that in my organization where we deal with at least several different clients per month. Month after month that would really start to add up. And beyond that, for each client, there is a lot of work being done spread across multiple applications, both desktop and web-based. The latter is particularly difficult to track, requiring at least a few unique URLs to be entered for each client. Additional files are opened remotely from an FTP, making tracking by client almost impossible.

It would be great to be able to switch between clients from the menu bar's dropdown menu, as manual activity toggling can currently be done. When a client is selected all activities would be attributed to the client.

To track time spent on blogs, etc. it would be easier to add relevant sites as a bookmark folder from Safari/Firefox, rather than adding them individually. The sites that I read regularly are contained in a couple of folders, but I'm always changing those folders as I decide what's worth my time. If added individually I could also see them starting to make using the Web/Documents tab difficult as they would overwhelm the URLs that I use to track web-based application usage.

Activities are different from projects and should be separated. Activities in slife are focused on applications or sets of applications, which is great, activities are needed - I have a useful activity called data analysis that includes several applications I commonly use to analyze data. I have several different research projects where I do data analysis as well as other activities like taking notes, reading, writing. It doesn't make sense to have a project in the same bucket as an activity, it needs a separate list that acts differently. Firstly there needs to be some manual component because slife can't tell when I'm reading a web page about mysql while I'm working on one project versus reading a very similar page while working on another project - maybe it can under some circumstances but I need to be able to override it since it won't be perfect. I'm sure there are strategies that slife can use to recognize when I switch projects, folder naming or whatever, but this is a fundamentally different thing than an activity and encompasses activities.

Here's another suggestion for functionality. It'd be nice to be able to specify when your work day starts and ends. I frequently stay up late working until after 2am, and then sleep and start working later the next morning. However, I'd like to count all the work I did (up till I went to sleep) as work done on the day before the work that starts again at 9 or 10am. Currently, slife reports all the work you've done between midnight to midnight, which makes it difficult to figure out individual "daily" work totals. This is especially important if you need to be able to report your "workday" productivity.