This week I discovered a fantastic Firefox plug-in called MeeTimer by Andy Mitchell, which actually helps me be more productive. Well.. I say this week, I have actually had it installed for a while, but have just found the motivation to configure and use it.
How it works is simple, it tracks the amount of time that you spend on individual websites, and allows you to group them by category. So, the company intranet may be classed as work, whereas hours whittled away on Facebook fall under the category of procrastination. All of this data is captured, and is available for your scrutiny. I’m also told that the next version will have lots of new features for slicing and dicing this data - including a quick slick Flex-based dashboard for visually exploring your data.
In addition to simple tracking, MeeTimer takes a pro-active role in making you productive, blacking out pages and adding pop-up’s to links - “Warning! You have already spent 4.4% of your working week poking your friend’s on Facebook, perhaps you should be working?”.
Its really quite cool, and its active deterrents really set it apart from other pieces of software which attempt to track the time spent in-front of the web browser.
For me I think that was the key to its usefulness, as it is far too easy to get carried away either on the likes of Facebook or even on geeky sites such as Ajaxian, which I often visit to keep up with the latest goings on in the JavaScript world. This is definitely a plug in which I will be keeping installed as I attempt to organize my life!