Chrometa Time Management Software Review

Ever wonder how your work week breaks down? How much time are you spending on e-mail and fact-checking each week? Chrometa may help with that curiosity!

You may remember this time management app from an article last month. About two weeks ago, I downloaded a free trial and took Chrometa for a test spin. Words of wisdom, Chrometa logs everything… EVERYTHING.

My day-to-day at work has gotten fairly routine — just the way I like it. I usually ride in on my bike (okay, I lie to sound cooler than I really am… it’s been snowy, cold and rainy, but if it had been warm, this would hold true), turn on my computer and open up each of my daily applications. Since it takes a few minutes before my computer is fully booted up, I’ll grab my Nalgene and walk around the corner to fill it up.

Microsoft Outlook. Mozilla Firefox. Tweet Deck. Google Chrome. Once those are all up and running, I get to it. Basically, half my day is spent here, at SoftwareNewsDaily.com, and the other half is spent on SoftwareMedia.com. I activated Chrometa for the past week, March 17 to March 24, for a more exact breakdown.

Okay, what about a review of the software? Chrometa is a great, easy-to-use and very thorough time logging application. Just how thorough you ask? Well… Google Reader is my homepage on Chrome. I’ll run through hundreds of posts each day using Reader. As I read posts or as more posts come in, the title of that page will change to reflect how many posts are unread — i.e.: Google Reader (545). Chrometa logs every single one of those title changes and how long I have been on that particularly titled page. And when I was installing an application (or uninstalling) or even when a program popped up a crash error, Chrometa would also log it. It’s that thorough. So, you can only imagine how much I had to sort through when it came to categorizing each item logged on Chrometa.

Chrometa’s best feature? It’s simple and hardly needs any attention at all. Once you’ve installed the program, just set it up to launch at startup (plus any other options you may desire) and let it ride. That’s it. Chrometa runs seamlessly in the background when your computer is turned on, logging each of your tasks automatically. It’ll also automatically detect whether when you are away. There’s an option to adjust your idle time before logging away time as well. When you get back to your computer, Chrometa pops up and asks how you would like to define that time away from the computer — lunch, phone call, etc… I was amazed at how easy Chrometa was to implement!

Despite the amazing detailed logging and the ease of using Chrometa, I felt there were a couple of faults: the lag and tags. While I was trying to compile the data together for the past week, I found the program to lag quite a bit. While I was trying to categorize each of my tasks, I found Chrometa took a few seconds after I created a new category to gather itself together again. There was also a bit of lag from clicking off or onto the “all categories” view.

Secondly, tags. Each task logged in Chrometa may only be assigned to one category — this is understandable. Say, you are a lawyer and each category represented a client you represented… Obviously, you could only tag each task to one client (or, at least, you shouldn’t be billing multiple clients for the same task, right?). However, I wish there was an option tagging to multiple categories. Spoiled by my Gmail, I like to sort my items to multiple tags. What if I wanted to break down a chart in various ways?

Let’s say I logged 3 hours researching on the Internet with Firefox for Client A and I want to create a pie chart using the types of applications I use and the clients I would be billing. Unfortunately, I can’t tag those 3 hours of research to two categories to create those two separate charts. Rather, I would need to categorize every task for one a chart in regards to the client. Then, re-categorize it (losing the previous categorization) to create a chart in regards to the application.

Recommendations for Chrometa 3.0? *Ability to create charts within the program — so I don’t have to type the data into Excel. *Tagging items to multiple categories with the advanced capacity to create “sets” of categories for creating different charts — uh… creating a “set” of category for each set of data that you would create a chart for… does that make more sense? *Fix that lag time.

All in all, Chrometa is a great easy-to-use program that captures your time thoroughly. It’s definitely worth a try if you need a time management app.

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