Work productivity, time management, organization, tools and tips

Surviving recession is not only the reason that makes it logical now more than ever for employers to find a way to discover how get the most out their resources. Maximizing resources should always be one of the top priorities of any venture. How can employers gain more profit from their efforts and investments? One method to increase profit is to increase the productivity of the staff. But how do you measure productivity? Do you wait until the end of the year to see if you've earned more than you've spent? Why not use tools to get that will unveil how your staff fares in terms of results.

One product that offers this service is AKS-Labs' MeasureProductivity, a software program that needs to be downloaded to the computer to monitor computer activities and provide productivity reports.

I downloaded its 30-day free trial version and I've found out about the following:

Signing up was not difficult since no email address was asked, you just need to download it. But the default profile was a bit confusing making me think the trial version is just a demo version wherein I can't input my own profile.

I check out a product's usability by using it without having to learn how to use it through its manual or any guidelines. And with this productivity software,

it took me some time before I figured out how it works.

After a few minutes of tinkering I've learned that you can see the productivity measures through right-clicking on the system tray icon and then clicking "Activity Analysis".

That dashboard is also where you can customize your profile. Customizing your profile will be helpful if you'd like to use the invoicing feature of MeasureProductivity. I'm confident that virtual assistants and other online workers will find this useful because you just have to continue your work normally and when you're done with your job, you only have to input the details of the job (count and comments), then click the "invoice" button and a clean and simple invoice report will be displayed. However, I'm wondering if there's a way that will allow one to automatically email invoice reports to clients.

Other reports that can be generated are the "Standard" and "Advanced" reports. The difference between the two is that Advanced reports show the details of the activity in processes. Activity in processes are those programs that you've opened while using your computer.

These reports are what will help one gauge the productivity of a computer user. The reports show the total time of activity and the details of when is the computer user actively using each computer program he or she opened. You can also take note of the "keyboard actions" and other computer activity info such as number of mouse clicks and wheels.

But I believe I need more time on using this product since I haven't grasped fully how to take advantage of the "Groups" feature.

All in all, most probably if you are diligent enough to read instructions, it might not be too difficult for you to use MeasureProductivity. But I'm sure this tool can use a bit more simplification to accommodate lazy folks like me. 

Evident from its features, MeasureProductivity will not only help employers learn how to make their staff increase productivity, online business owners and/or self-employed web workers can use it too to maximize their computer productivity. The Internet is one big source of distractions, aside from the History feature of your browser, MeasureProductivity can serve as a tool that will gently nag you about your detours. Also, an interesting possible use for this software is for parents with computer-savvy kids in monitoring their kids' computer activities to protect them from online predators. To complement this purpose, private investigators may benefit from this product as well.

Anyone using MeasureProductivity software? Let us know how it fared.

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