A friend of mine pointed out a very cool Firefox add-in called MeeTimer that I really think is a good idea. If you've ever spent waaay too much time on YouTube after someone sent you a link to a video, you should check this out. Same goes for getting sucked into web "research" that causes hours to go by without you noticing.
What's MeeTime do? Well, I think they describe it pretty well on their site:
"MeeTimer has a simple role: it records where you spend your time online. It does it in a rather useful way, by allowing you to group websites into activities (e.g. Facebook = procrastination; Gmail = communication) so you can make sense of where your time is going. Finally, it accumulates time spent on a site over the course of a day, so when you think "just another 2 mins won't hurt" you realise that actually, yes, it will ;)" |
Meetimer provides some easy-to-understand reporting to make it easy to tell what's sucking your time online, and they provide some good tips for reducing procrastination online.
And, if reporting isn't enough for you, you can configure MeeTimer to popup a warning dialog when you spend too much time on a particular site.
Like most Firefox add-ins it's free, though the author does accept donations if you find that this tool is useful (and you probably will). If you're a Firefox user and want to reduce the time you waste online, install MeeTimer right now.