Track and manage your time online with 8aweek

Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Web services

Track and manage your time online with 8aweek

by Brad Linder Feb 15th 2008

Ever get the feeling you'd be a lot more productive at work if you didn't spend 3 hours a day on YouTube, and another 2 hours updating your Facebook profile? 8aweek is a new Firefox plugin that helps you keep track of thet time you spend on web pages. And if you need a gentle reminder that you just can't handle the freedom, you can tell 8aweek to restrict the amount of time you spend on certain sites.

When you install 8aweek and then reboot Firefox you should see a new browse toolbar. Click on the View habits and you'll be taken to a web page showing how much time you've spent on every web site while logging was enabled. 8aweek seems to know the difference between a page you're actively looking at and a page that's open in a background tab and will only log pages in the foreground. But it doesn't differentiate sub-sites. For example, Gmail and Google Reader are lumped together as Google. And since Download Squad's blogging client Blogsmith is hosted by our parent company, AOL, 8aweek reports that we've been spending a lot of time at AOL.com.

You can also click on the restricted tab to add pages that you don't want to spend too much time on. Then click the preferences tab to determine how much time is too much. By default, this setting is 30 minutes. There doesn't appear to be a way to set different time limits for different sites.

The browser toolbar also lets you "save" links to pages you want to come back to later. So you can use 8aweek as an alternative to Read it Later or Instapaper, but with a nagging/analytic feature.

[via TechCrunch]

Tags: 8aweek, bookmarking, time-management

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

sina said 2:52PM on 2-16-2008

This is so awesome!!! Thanks for the post.

RP said 2:37AM on 2-17-2008

Very cool!

One bug I noticed: I read slashdot.org for 3-4 minutes, and middle-clicked 6 links during that time. Those links loaded in background tabs, which I didn't see. However, 8aweek showed just a few seconds spent at slashdot.org, and most of the 3-4 minutes spent at the 6 links I middle-clicked but didn't view.

I am using the "Tabbrowser Preferences" add-on, if that matters.

RP said 8:39AM on 2-17-2008

RP said 2:15PM on 2-18-2008

The 8aweek website seems to be dying, spitting out 500 errors now. :-(

RP said 1:02PM on 2-19-2008

Has anyone else seen high memory use after installing this? My Firefox memory is at 715 MB now. I've never seen it go above 300 MB before.

It could be a certain website, I guess, but maybe it's 8aweek? How can I track down what's sucking up my Firefox memory?

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