Beat Procrastination: Here's a Free Tool to Watch Over You
Procrastination and time wasting are, in many ways, easier traps for web workers to fall into than they are for many other kinds of workers. You’ve probably seen the alarming numbers on how much time Internet connected workers tend to waste on everything from personal surfing to reading online news. If you use Firefox all day, install the free MeeTimer extension to start taking control of your time sinks.
MeeTimer keeps a running log of the amount of time you spend on each visit to web sites. It sits in your Firefox tray at the bottom of the screen, and your log can be pulled up at any time by hovering your mouse arrow over a small “T” in the tray. You group the sites you visit by the type of activity they represent: procrastination, search, work, communication, etc.
If the application sounds like Big Brother, it does have more than a trace of surveillance to it, but you can control how you choose to have it behave. If you want, you can keep it very tame and just occasionally take a look at your log to get an aerial view of how much time you spend on non-work activities. In that case, it’s essentially a productivity tool.
Or, if you want to go a step further, you can choose to have MeeTimer attempt to deter from you from visiting sites that are helping you procrastinate and waste time. Note that it does not force you away from such sites; instead, it issues a gentle reminder. If you choose to have it deter you, MeeTimer will black out pages as you load them and give you the option to close the tabs for them. It even displays a summary of how much time you’ve wasted at the site that week as a percentage of your work week: “14 percent of your work week,” etc. You can go ahead and view the page if you want, but you get the reminder first.
MeeTimer does a pretty good job of offering up surprises about how you work. If you’re like most web workers you’ll find the number of work week hours that MeeTimer determines you spend procrastinating is much higher than you tend to think. I also find it surprising to look at how much time I spend on web searches. Then again, maybe a little time wasting while working is okay with you.
Do you have any good tips on time management for web workers?
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Are there any similar tools like this for internet explorer?
Neat idea. But the implementation needs some work. I’ve installed it and have to say that it’s very buggy. I can’t edit groups (add/rename/delete). Adding sites to groups doesn’t always work. Settings aren’t saved at all. And I even had Firefox crashing on me twice these morning (which rarely happened before I installed the extension).
I hope some work will be done in fixing these nuances, because this is really something I’d love to use. This is my last hope in fighting procrastination :)
Just installed it, and will now be testing it.
@leonid – I can see how hopeless you are :D since you’re spending more time tinkering with the options of anti-procrastination software and posting bug reports :D (I feel for you!)
This sounds interesting, but since my company forces use of IE, I can’t use it. However, I have been successfully using a freeware program called Temptation Blocker, which simply blocks easy access to certain programs for a user-specified period of time (minutes or hours). Should you need to utilize the program after turning on the timer, you can enter a 32 digit random key. The only issue I’ve found is that, in my case, since I’m turning off access to Internet Explorer, I also cannot access Citrix and other web-based programs. Perhaps someone can improve upon the software so that you can block user-specified websites. Here is a link to the program on Sourceforge.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/temptblocker/
Great little tool! I wasn’t surprised to find out I was wasting time…but how much was an eye opener. Thanks!
Lon Naylor
@leonid,
Are you on v0.21? I know there are a few Linux issues that need sorting; but that’s the first time I’ve heard of those bugs affecting the current release.
Perhaps you could drop me an email? (andy@productivefirefox.com) And I’ll try & get it sorted for you (and anyone else that is affected!).
@Steve,
We have no current plans for IE support; but if the popularity grows on Firefox we’ll look at porting it over!
Time management is an essential skill that helps you keep your work under control, at the same time that it helps you keep stress to a minimum. Time management is mostly about energy management. If we increase our energy, we increase our productivity. So one of the things I work on is increasing my energy.
Time management is governed by to-do lists, then you’ll be interested in the weekly objectives list. Think of the weekly objectives list as a muscle-bound to-do list. In essence, the weekly objective list is a to-do list with additional features to further decompose tasks into smaller units and to record time estimates for the task.