5 Tools to Track How Much Time you Waste while Online

Your Firefox hasn’t been re-started in hours. It’s running continuously, you’re surfing around websites, and of course you’ve wasted lots of time. You could have instead spent that time doing something good and productive, rather than just flying around worthless sites.

Here are four neat Firefox extensions and 1 desktop app that help you track the time you spend online. They even give you reports so you can watch out and make efficient use of your time by cutting down on wandering around sites that are of no use.

LeechBlock

leechblock LeechBlock can be set to block websites from loading in Firefox.

You can create up to six ‘block sets’ – each set can contain a number of sites that should be blocked only during a specific time interval.

For example, you can create a block set and put all the social networking sites in it – and block all those sites together for a set period of time (instance, 9AM-4PM). Then you can create another block set – containing another bunch of time-consuming sites and block them all together for a specified time period. That’s how block sets work. Wildcards can be used to block specific subdomains/parts of a bigger site.

Download LeechBlock

Time Tracker

Simple yet effective tool that tracks the amount of time you’ve been browsing around. The display on the status bar indicates the amount of time you’ve been surfing around inside Firefox.

Time Tracker Firefox Extension

As you can see in the options above, you can set the status bar display of TimeTracker to show only the time you’ve spent today/last reset/since installing Time Tracker. In the time-out option, you can specify when the addon should pause counting the time. You can use the filter list to add websites that will not be time-tracked.

If you want to continue tracking the time even when the new windows are opened then leave the last checkbox unchecked.

Download TimeTracker

8aWeek

8aweek

Same as the first extension, but it has more powerful options and provides graphs that display the various activities versus the time you’ve spent on them.

Once installed, you’ll see a toolbar that has around four options. You’ll also be taken to a registration page. You could register if you want the reports to be saved for the long term. Else, you can skip it and continue using 8aweek.

It provides interesting charts like the one below that lists the amount of time I’ve spent on each site:

8aweekchart.JPG

You can set it to limit the time you spend on useless sites. For example, you could set it to make Facebook available to you for no more than 10 minutes per day. Additionally, you can also save the reports for later viewing. For more details check out our directory listing on 8aWeek.

Download 8aweek

MeeTimer

MeeTimer is a plain and light activity tracker. It keeps track of the visited websites in any given day, records total time, and groups them into purpose-based categories (e.g. Myspace/Facebook = procrastination, Gmail = communication, etc.). At the end of the day you get a clear picture of your daily activity.

Stop Procrastinating with MeeTimer

Download MeeTimer

RescueTime

Unlike the above, RescueTime is a desktop program. Same goal here, understand how and where you spend your time while browsing web or working on PC. Find out what programs and websites take most of your time (Digg, Wikipedia, Word, Google, Dreamweaver “¦). Cool thing about this app is that it’s completely automated and requires almost no effort on your behalf. The only thing you have to do is assign different programs and sites to certain tags.

Rescue Time

Get Rescuetime here

Do you know of any other good tools for managing your time on the internet? Let us know in the comments!

(By) Shankar Ganesh, a 16 year old Blogger and Freelance Writer from India. He writes about computers and software at Killer Tech Tips

Tagged: • • • •

Shankar Ganesh

A 16 year old Techie, High School Student, Blogger and Part Time Freelance Writer from India. He writes about computers and software at Killer Tech Tips

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  • Richard

    I NEED internet time managment.

  • http://www.tinsie.net/Recommended Tina

    Oh my, think about all the time it takes to set up and manage these tools. I’d rather spend that time reading your articles Shankar. ;)
    Good post!

  • http://systemBash.com Dave Drager

    ++ For rescuetime, but it just makes me depressed when I see how much time I waste! :)

  • http://www.rescuetime.com Tony Wright

    Hi– thanks for mentioning us (RescueTime)! One additional thing to note is that RescueTime is friendly to Mac/PC— and now Linux! One of our great users dove in and built a Linux version.

    On, I should also note that the about RescueTime screenshot is slightly out of date– we have a lot of new/cool features (you can see ‘em at: http://rescuetime.com/product_tour ).

    Thanks again!

  • http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/ Michael VanDeMar

    Do you have any idea how long it took me to read this whole article..?

    Nice tools btw. :)

  • Andario

    Man, this is REALLY useful. Kind of stressful, though, but if you help me out finding my life back again, I will be eternally grateful. :D Cheers!

  • http://www.all-acronyms.com Acronyms

    The best tool is when your company is using Internet Access monitoring =)

  • richard

    I cant think of anything worse.
    I know i waste hours of time online but to quantify it in this way…

    Just dont tell my boss about these…………

  • http://askabouttech.com/ Tyler

    Nice tools, seems kinda counter productive though.

  • http://www.prewrittencontent.com Marcel

    I was wanting something like this for such a long time.

    Now I wish I didn’t find it… sort of

  • http://fire-pixel.com fire-pixel.com

    Ah! Big Brother Internet! Stay Away!

    Good for kids but I actually promote Internet use… it’s when you start blocking and stifling that your employees work harder working the angles than they do actual work… thus defeating the purpose. You end up creating a cattle in a cubicle. Which is fine if you like CSR agents that do just “canned” lines all day long.

    So I guess I’ll reciprocate with another article you might enjoy.

    Top 10 Awesome Websites That Sell Cool Products You Probably Have Never Visited But Need To.

    http://www.comember.net/blogs/firepixel/

    Thanks!

  • http://chvnx.com chvnx

    MeeTimer FTW!

    I use this to track my non-work related internet activities while at work.

  • http://www.ratemystudentrental.com Steve

    Hmm, these look very cool. I keep meaning to check these out, but I’m so busy surfing net.

    Oh, and I like to call it “researching” on the internet, not so much “wasting time.”

  • Hagata

    You might look at “Wakoopa”(.com), which is a rather simple usage pattern tracking tool installed locally but displayed online. Also possible to integrate into your lifestream.

  • http://techmalaya.com Syahid A.

    I use RescueTime and never looked back again. Simple, install and forget tool. Kudos to their dev team.

  • Dod One

    Looks as if I am the only commenter using 8aweek. It’s a nice extension and you waste almost no time to install it. It has some nice features and the authors are responsive to comments. As for me “it’s doing the job”

    I used before Google Web History. It is inferior to 8aweek and you should be logged in to Google in order to track what / where you are surfing.

    You may read the article in TechCrunch about 8aweek
    http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/15/8aweek-to-help-you-kick-that-internet-time-wasting-addiction/

  • http://www.xperttimer.com Daniela

    Hi,
    we use Xpert-Timer to track all of our times. From smoking breaks to web development and time spend on the internet.
    You can download a free 30 days trial version at (desktop application only)

  • http://awaw violon

    oy hawaa inyo opendns sa amo computer kay na block tanan…

  • Andrew

    Another tool for tracking wasted time (daily, weekly, monthly and yearly):

    TimeManagementRocks.com

  • Bulu

    is ther any software when I open internet explore it records the time and when I close internet explorer it also records time.

  • Nathan

    It’s too bad probably no-one will read my comment. I haven’t tried these apps, but I’m going to. I’ve been using a much more heavy-duty solution, and it’s crushed all my internet addictions like a tank driving over papier mache toys. It’s K9 web protection. It’s free for personal use. I give the password to my buddy and I have to ask him to email it to me if I need to change anything. It’s been so great.

  • Norma

    I’m “surfing the web” at 5am. It’s quite appropriate that I’d run into this article. Installing RescueTime now! May look into K9.

  • http://www.thinkGardner.com Daniel

    Did a google search for time trackers such as these and found this post. Installing RescueTime right now. How many of us are internet addicts but aren’t willing to admit it?