After a happy summer weekend, most people wouldn’t be too excited about going back to work on Monday morning. But today is a really special day for us at Slife Labs. We are finally releasing the new “Productivity Plus” product we’ve referred to in the past. It’s called Slife Rewards and we think it represents a whole new approach to productivity software.

We’ve been studying the problem of time management, information overload and productivity in general for quite some time. The conclusion we’ve drawn after many years developing products and talking to customers is that it really comes down to motivation. It’s cool and interesting to visualize activities and useful to keep track of time automatically, but if you are trying to change your behavior in order to focus on your work and say, not spend a large part of your day browsing from one Internet distraction to another, an extra motivational push is really helpful.

Enter Slife Rewards. As a feature inside Slife Web (you will need a Slife Web account to use it), it allows you to associate activity goals with rewards. If you reach your daily productivity goals for an entire month, such as “spend no more than 20 minutes on email every day”, you get a reward.

Initially there are two types of rewards you can choose from. You can either choose to receive an item from your Amazon wish list when you meet your goals or you can choose to make a donation to a cause you care about. There are several causes that we are supporting initially, from the American Red Cross to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We plan to add more causes and reward types in the future. The possibilities are endless.

Now, what’s important to understand about this new service is that you are actually the one who’s financing your own rewards. Within Slife Web, you make deposits to your Slife Rewards fund and we use your funds to buy and send you a gift or make a donation on your behalf. Our role is in providing the incentive platform to help you reach your productivity objectives, but the reward is on you. There’s no catch here. Also, because of the overhead associated with reward processing, we will charge you a small fee ($2) every month you reach your goals and process your reward.

For additional details and a video, please check the Slife Rewards site. We would love to get your feedback about this new tool. Because of this new service we are also adding a new section to our Terms of Service.