With computers easing our day to day tasks and humans leveraging on these machines to perform all of their vital functions, there are ample chances for the latter to skip on some of the important tasks and end up wasting time on fancy apps in the computer. There is a need for a tool that can track the time spent on different activity oriented applications to measure the exact productivity. The device or the tool to measure the changes is called a Personal Activity Monitor.
What are Personal Activity Monitors
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The PAM was designed for people who waste time on unimportant tasks, letting them know the exact time consumed by every active application. PAM proves to be advantageous over other management software like Squirrel and True time trackers by offering a simple interface with lesser configurations to install.
Who should use personal activity monitors?
These are best for people wanting to enhance their productivity through their online business; people who wish to know the exact time consumed by their computer related activities should make use of PAM. Professionals who want to have an idea of all the programs and apps they have used in a day can do so by tracking time they spend on each app.
Personal activity monitors do an excellent job of tracking every single application that has been launched and used by the user. It portrays the exact results as a simple graph and adds up the time of how long each app was used. People can always look back at the software to make a note of their important time wasters and avoid them in future. This reflects a great deal on their personal productivity fronts.
Parameters portrayed by Personal Activity Monitors
- PAM displays information as a graph and the currently used application stays on top of the list.
- They are arranged in a chronological order of use and list important details like application name, usage of the application in minutes and in percentages.
- Graphical visualization of the data and the exact time spent is also displayed by comparing each app with that of the other.
- The application is easy to install in the computer and starts functioning once the computer is booted. Therefore it is easy to precisely and correctly locate and manage the time wasters.
- The software gets idle after inactivity for about 30 seconds, which could be altered to lie in the ranges of one second to 5 minutes. The app timers would not resume until the computer is started again.
- Users can export the graphical information given by the software in xml data for future use.
How to use the Personal activity monitors?
To begin with, the application has to be downloaded from the web (free downloads are possible with many websites on the web) and has to be launched. Once it is in the system, it starts every time the system is switched on and calculates the exact time that is being consumed by active applications being used by the user.
After the day’s work is done, users can retrieve the information on the exact amount of time spent on each application and the main interface displays only the active apps. The entire data is shown as a histogram.
It is said that these are just the start up features of this time tracking software and consumers could expect more upgrades in such personal activity monitors such as timely analysis and report generation etc. in the near future.
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