Productivity Sauce

Keeping track of time you spend on specific tasks is essential if you are paid by the hour. Moreover, knowing exactly how you spend your working time can help you to optimize your workflow and be more productive. There are quite a few time tracking solutions out there, including the nifty Rachota utility which not only makes it easy to track time spent on different tasks but also helps you to analyze the collected data.

Rachota is written in Java, so you need to install the Java Runtime Environment before you can run the application on your system. Using Rachota is pretty straightforward. To add a task, press the Add button, fill out the required fields, and hit OK. Press the Select button, and hit Work to activate the task. When you take a break from the active task, press the Relax button. Use the Done button to finish the task. You can add as many tasks as you want, but you can only have one active task at a time. Using the navigation buttons, you can quickly jump to a specific day, which can come in handy when you need to see what tasks you worked on that day and how much time you spent on each task.

Rachota features rather nifty reporting capabilities that give you an instant overview of the tracked data and can help you to analyze that information. The Times section under the History tab presents all the tasks as a bar chart, while the Tasks section lets you view only specific tasks using user-defined filters. The Projects section displays all the tasks grouped by category, and you can also generate an HTML report based on the collected data. The Analytics section offers a brief analysis based on the tracked data divided into several categories, including Effectivity (how effectively you use your working hours), Prioritization (distribution of priorities across tasks) and Granularity (average time required to complete a task).

Tracking time with Rachota (or any time tracking tool for that matter) requires self-discipline. But if you are willing to put some work into it, Rachota will reward you with some valuable insights about your working habits and will help to make your daily work more efficient.

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