Blogging Tips

A couple of weeks ago, someone introduced me to Chrometa. It’s a time tracking application that aims to let you ‘set it and forget it’ so you can see where you are spending your time. With Chrometa you can be sure that no action will go unrecorded as it tracks actions by the second. Unlike other similar apps, Chrometa includes the names of documents you have open plus the titles of your open browser tabs and, important for bloggers, the names of open documents in Windows Live Writer.

The program starts with your computer in the morning and resolutely tracks all your activity – and your inactivity. There’s no longer any need to guess how much time you spent away from your computer that you counted as work time. Chrometa logs inactive time too, and offers you the chance to tag it as meeting, phone or lunch – or input a custom tag.

Setting Up Chrometa

Let me describe how my Chrometa setup to illustrate how useful this is for professional bloggers. The first thing I did was create labels for all my main blogging and writing clients. I also created a label for myself, with sub-labels for common tasks such as checking email and doing my banking. it’s important to have these setup to take advantage of Chrometa’s killer feature – timestamp tagging. Click on the Timestamps button to see the time tracked that day. You can then apply timestamps to particular activities (such as logging when you worked on a post for a client) or applications (such as tagging Skype as phone calls). You can either apply timestamps individually to particular actions, highlight a group of actions to tag, or tag a particular group. Whichever you choose, you will find that there’s less tagging to do after a few days of using Chrometa.

The application’s options allow you to change the interval that’s logged as away time and to block tracking for certain applications.  You can navigate through different dates to see what you have done in a particular period or select day, week or month views to check activity for those time spans. You can even set custom date ranges. Oh, and you can pause tracking manually at any time.

Reporting and Exporting

Chrometa features a handy Excel export for keeping your data outside the application, but I find this less useful than the window view which shows me what percentage of my time is spent where.  One thing’s for sure, you won’t be in any doubt when you use Chrometa. The fact that it tracks every second makes it a real winner.

And now for the niggles – I find the timestamp tagging a bit fiddly – it’s easier to tag uncategorized actions in the main window than in the timestamps window – and I’d love for it to recognize all instances of my Gmail inbox tab as email, rather than having to retag it each time.  Those are small things, though, and I think the application’s usefulness far outweighs them. Chrometa is available on a 30 day trial, after which you can purchase it, though special educational and non-profit deals are available.