"Many professionals bill clients for their time. Even if you don't, keeping track of the time you actually spend on tasks can help you improve your time estimates and check if you're spending enough time on the things that are important to you. For example, keeping track of the time you spend on tasks might show you that you spend two and a half hours each day just responding to e-mail. If you can identify problem areas like that, then you can look for more effective ways to perform the tasks that take up a lot of your time. I love Org's timeclocking support, and I think you will too. Because it's integrated with your task list, you don't have to switch to separate application or reenter data. You can get more detailed time reports, too.

Hamster is a time tracking tool that runs as a GNOME panel applet. With Hamster, you can track what you're doing, when you're doing it, and for how long easily and right from your panel. Hamster will be included in GNOME version 2.24, and likely also in Ubuntu 8.10.

Mantis is that rare bug-tracking program for small projects that is neither too bloated nor too featureless. It's an excellent choice for developers who need a bug tracker that the average computer user can use. Its clean interface and numerous features make bug tracking fast and easy.

Everybody makes New Year's resolutions, and I wonder how many of you made the resolution to waste less time browsing the internet? If so, here's an easy way to track the amount of time you spend online.

This chart gives you an idea of who might be tracking you, or be capable of tracking you and sharing information with law enforcement.

Tasktop Technologies has announced updated versions of its Tasktop Pro task management for application lifecycle management (ALM) toolsuite, and of Eclipse Mylyn. New features include time-tracking, document sharing, and ALM system interoperability that fills a gap between software development delivery and Agile project tracking and management.

Task Coach is a simple open source todo manager to keep track of personal tasks and todo lists. It grew out of a frustration that most task managers do not provide facilities for composite tasks. Often, tasks and other things todo consist of several activities. Task Coach is designed to deal with composite tasks. In addition, it offers effort tracking, categories, and notes.

One of those tools (GnoTime) takes keep track of time to new levels. Not only does GnoTime keep track of your time worked, it also allows you to keep journals of your activities as well as generate reports and invoices based on your time worked.

If you've spent any time examining the network traffic to and from your web browser, you will notice the prolific number of trackers embedded in the pages. Blocking them at the firewall will stop every form of tracking from the sites blocked. In some cases it will even speed up loading and rendering.