How to Reduce Online Procrastination?
The Web is replacing the TV as the #1 time-thief in our lives. And, unlike the TV, the Web cannot be shared with friends; nor does it respect the boundaries of work. Thus you spend more time ‘working’ and less time socializing. This ramps up stress for everyone; but particularly affects those who charge by the hour (and thus actually lose money to procrastination, in addition to less free time).
Thus we wrote MeeTimer, a Firefox extension that uses a two-pronged attack to curb your (misplaced) time online. First, it makes you aware, explicitly showing you which activities and sites are taking up most of your time… you will be surprised! Second, it actively deters you from using a site, in case your willpower is not up to the task!
A core design principle is to ‘advise’ you, rather than ‘force’ you. This is because there are plenty of times where you legitimately need to bend the rules – e.g. to check some new resource for work – and thus you waste time (not to mention become frustrated) fighting against tools that try to block the Web. MeeTimer does not fight, it guides.
Using MeeTimer
Before reading further, please make sure you have installed MeeTimer and familiarised yourself with the Help; which gives you a functional overview and tips on getting started.
The Basic Idea
The system is heavily focused on the ‘working week’; as seeing what % of your week you could save is perhaps the most significant stat to change your actions.
Getting the Most from MeeTimer
Shock Yourself
Periodically run your mouse over the MeeTimer icon in Firefox’s tray to see the tooltip. In particular, observe the working-week figures to see how many hours – and what percentage of the week – has been lost to unnecessary websites. Scary isn’t it? That’s the amount of time you might as well not been at work – i.e. the amount of time you could be at home (or if you’re independent, the number of hours you could have been making more money).
If you become numb to this, load up the Stats and check the figures for the last month!
Understanding just how much time is disappearing is key to actually acting upon it. No deterrent-based system will work if you actually want to get around it; it has to be your choice.
Isolate ‘Work Time’
Some sites are legitimate for your work, but unfortunately, these are especially bad. Why? Because the odd visit to a work related site is something your mind uses against you, “It’s okay, not all your Internet use has been bad – you were doing work stuff!”. It doesn’t matter that it was one useful site for every ten-time wasters; you’ve justified yourself. The statistics lose their personal impact.
You can isolate work sites by adding them to the ‘Work’ group, thus easily seeing the contrast between work-time and less-productive-time.
Only Activate MeeTimer When You Should Be Working
For the same reason as above – not deceiving yourself – you should Suspend MeeTimer when you know you’re kicking back. Otherwise, the clock will continue to roll, and when you see the figures you will tell yourself “ah, but some of that was legitimate leisure surfing”. Good examples of Suspended surfing are food and coffee breaks; weekends; etc.
Use the ‘Black Out’ Warning Deterrent Sparingly
Think of this as a final measure. Used for only the most serious of your procrastination sites. That way, when you see it, it still has the impact to make you think twice. If you use it all the time; it becomes far too habitual to click past it.
Using the Options, you can restrict which Groups will be inhibited by the Black Out.
Keep it Active over Long Periods
Even if you do not like any other part of the functionality; you might like to keep logging in. Using the Options, you can completely remove MeeTimer from everyday view; and using some nifty Firefox technology, there is no noticeable performance impact to using MeeTimer.
In the future, you can periodically review stats; and in later releases, you will be able to do much more interesting visualizations of the accumulated data.