This Extension Will Track the Cost of Your Thoughtless Web Browsing
Sure, you need to finish your PowerPoint presentation next week, but it doesn’t hurt to just quickly check Facebook and see if Mark posted photos from the party last weekend. Then make a quick order on Amazon. And you should really like a few of the photos in this gallery … It’s easy to spend a few minutes (or hours) on the Internet without even realizing it. If you’re a masochist and want to know exactly how much time and money this simple browsing is costing you, an extension for Firefox and Chrome called Sloth Worth can help. It tracks your surfing the web and lets you know when a quick glance starts to get out of hand.
The functionality of the application depends to some extent on the fact that you have a job that is not related to writing articles for the Internet. Both Nick Douglas and I tried Sloth Worth this week and quickly came to the same conclusion: This is not a Lifehacker writer extension.
It looks like the extension counts a large number of sites as wasted time, including this one, so if your job is literally to keep Lifehacker open all day, you will quickly rack up an hour and hours of wasted time. However, if you actually have to work on PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets all day, this might come in handy.
With the extension, you enter your hourly rate, and then it tracks how much time you “spend” on the Internet during the day, calculating it in dollars, which matches your hourly rate. So, if you make $ 30 an hour and spend 3 hours on Facebook, you’ve essentially “spent” $ 90 (or got $ 90 from your employer to be on Facebook, depending on where you are. surfing).
The running score is kept inside the extension icon in Chrome and also in the top corner of each of the offending pages. Although this is a checking account for all sites you spend time on, not sites.
Unfortunately, you also cannot customize which sites count as wasted time, you need to rely on Sloth Worth for that. This means that it can (and probably will, in my experience) erroneously count some of the sites you need to work, just like it does for Facebook.
While scoring will be pointless to almost everyone, I think the clock on the corner of a website is surprisingly helpful. It is very easy for me to fall into the rabbit hole by reading stories or looking at Facebook posts. An hour (or two) passed before I realized it, and I was far behind in what I needed to do that day. With that in mind, the clock on the side serves as a great digital representation of the time and is the reward (or guilt) I need to close a few pages and move on to the next.
Given my profession, I think Sloth Worth is too annoying for me to leave it always installed. However, I can definitely see it come in handy when I need to focus on a large project, or if at any time I am actively trying to cut back on a particular site.