GetMeeTimer.com- Track and Change Your Online Habits

Ever wonder where all your time goes? Well if you’re reading this particular website, odds are you’re someone who spends a fair amount of time on the Internet. MeeTimer is a Firefox extension for tracking your online activity, and also offers features to help you alter your surfing habits. With MeeTimer, you can track general trends in your Internet usage by creating categories. For instance, you could add a “Social Networking” category to clock your combined time spent on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, or simply divide sites into categories like Procrastination, Work, and Email. You can view your results for a single day, or see the total time and daily averages for a specific period (this week, last 31 days, last year, etc.). You can even see what percentage of your work week is spent procrastinating online. All the collected data is stored on your machine and nothing is transmitted back to MeeTimer, thus minimizing any privacy concerns.

For some people, simply seeing a report of their Internet usage may be enough to inspire a change in surfing habits. But if you’re the type who always breaks your new year’s resolution by January 3rd, you may find the LinkWarn and TabWarn features useful. When turned on, these will black out selected pages when you first load them and tell you how much time you have already spent there, so you can reconsider whether to proceed. The site also includes a “How to reduce online procrastination” page of tips for how to maximize MeeTimer’s benefits.

“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… What's the Point? Beyond the revelations of where your time really goes, it enables you to become proactive. Once you realise that you're actually spending an hour a day on non-productive sites; you can cut it down.”

MeeTimer could be particularly useful because of the many ways it can be personalized - by grouping websites, viewing different time periods, and/or adding procrastination deterrents. Parents could also use the extension to track their children’s Internet usage, or small business owners could use it as a free means to track employees’ online habits.

Will this program be expanded to work with other browsers besides Firefox? Once you get used to the deterrent features, will their effect start to wear off, therefore becoming less useful? If you leave a page open in the background while actively working on something else, or if you leave your browser open when you are not at the computer, won't it throw off all your results and averages?