Stop Me!

Every once in a while I think about the fact that only 20 years ago, the Internet was in its infancy. It's hard to believe, given how much of our lives now center around online activities. Shopping, chatting, news, reading books, listening to music, chasing down a subject, getting directions, blogging, uploading videos... you get the idea. And now, with our computers - both at home and at work - plus our smart phones and iPads, we have more ways than ever to be "interacting" wherever we are, whatever else we might be doing.

And if you're under 18, your entire life is centered on online activity.  Says a recent study, quoted in the New York Times:
Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones. And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.
So, if you think you're spending too much time online, here are a handful of applications (as shown on the site, makeuseof.com) that can help you track - and halt - the hours you waste in meaningless or productivity-sapping detours. These are all extensions for Firefox, but similar ones can be found for IE, Chrome, and Safari.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 8aWeek is similar to LeechBlock.  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. And it will display in horrifying chart format the amount of time you've spent at various types of activities online.
4. MeeTimer tracks the amount of time you spend on various sites, and then groups them according to a pre-set schedule of categories: procrastination, communication, etc. You get to see just how much of each day, each week, you've spent numbing your brain.
5.RescueTime is a desktop-resident app that tracks not only your online, but your offline activities. So you can see how much time you've spent at work (PhotoShop, Premiere, etc.) as well as how much on Facebook or Gmail.

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