
New YC Company 8aweek To Help You Kick That Internet Time Wasting Addiction - alaskamiller
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/15/8aweek-to-help-you-kick-that-internet-time-wasting-addiction/
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dcurtis
Too close for comfort is right-- it's pretty much exactly the same as
rescuetime, only with fewer features, a worse interface, and new tools that
let you interfere with your browsing (which I suppose is its distinguishing
feature).

This is confusing to me-- why not just have RescueTime implement these
features rather than fund an entirely new company? Did I miss something?

\--edit--

So I watched the video, and it looks like this is a pretty awesome toolbar.
The features are pretty cool. The site/copy is cheesy, though.

My comment about RescueTime and the closeness of their businesses still stands
though-- I have a feeling this would be fairly easy for RescueTime to
implement.

~~~
pg
_Did I miss something?_

Several. One is that the time-suck of the Internet is a big problem, which
means that dealing with it will be a big business, which means there will be
room for many slightly differing approaches.

The other is that we can't "have" people implement features. These are
startups, not employees.

~~~
dcurtis
Of course you can't "have" RescueTime implement a certain feature, but you do
have clout at y-funded companies, right? I mean, it's in your best interest to
push the funded companies into success by suggesting new/complementary
features.

The time-suck industry will be an interesting one to watch; I can see why you
chose to fund 8aweek. The major problem I see with using a toolbar is that the
time-suck, in many ways, is due to internet addiction. And if it's easy to
bypass the toolbar, it might not be very useful. Addiction usually wins.
Noprocrast fails in that regard, because you can simply launch another
browser.

Can anyone share how much they ignore noprocrast?

If you have enough personal responsibility to obey noprocrast/toolbar
restrictions, I can see how this would be awesome. But I also think that
market is probably small. Snooze is obviously the way 8aweek tries to get
around this, but after a while I think it might get annoying. I'll try it,
though, and see how it goes.

~~~
sonink
noprocrast works for me big time ..i will be willing to pay sites to implement
noprocrast

~~~
ntoshev
A Greasemonkey script would be a better solution... Even for news.YC, if you
have an independent solution pg wouldn't know how likely you are to override
the noprocrast setting ;)

I would take on this project if I had any time, which I probably waste now...
hmmm... ;)

~~~
thingsilearned
8aweek works much in the same way, but is its own FF extension to allow for
some extra features and ease of install that you can't get through
greasemonkey.

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Tichy
First impression, it seems very nicely done. RescueTime is not available for
Linux, and I prefer local logging, so I'll give this a shot.

~~~
nanijoe
Local logging is definitely a big plus... I feel a little uncomfortable with
having a log of all te websites I have visited on someone's server somewhere

~~~
marcus
Ashamed of those hours in front of msdn.microsoft.com?

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donal
I'm willing to try out 8aweek for the simple reason is if I'm doing work, I'm
running Linux. I liked RescueTime, for the little that I experimented with it,
but when I'm running Windows I'm usually just messing about.

~~~
nostrademons
I really wish there was something that, like RescueTime, tracked applications,
but did so on Linux. I also use Linux for work and Windows for messing around,
but the interesting stuff I'm working on is all gvim/terminal. I'd like to be
able to tag those so I get a sense of which subsections of the code take the
most time, how much do I spend waiting on compiles or installing software, how
much time is spent code-writing vs. research, etc. A pure Firefox plugin
doesn't tell me the interesting stuff.

~~~
donal
Yeah, my work life can be described as a dark room, a huge monitor, and a
fullscreen terminal running vim.

Statistically it does miss a lot, but I was looking for a way to try and
throttling my online mucking about. I haven't run out of "countdown" yet
today. Heck it says: 21.3 minutes remaining...

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Tichy
I wonder what is a reasonable way to count the time on a website? I have
simple Greasemonkey script that blocks web sites and have also considered to
add the monitoring functionality. My thoughts would have been to stop counting
after, say, 15 minutes of inactivity. It would be a shame if a site stays open
and counts for hours of usage because the user forgets to close it.

~~~
garbowza
8aweek only tracks time for the current tab that you are active in, and after
5 minutes of no mouse movement it'll realize you're inactive and not count
that time.

~~~
hollerith
Once it realizes you're inactive, does it add the 5 minutes back to the clock?

~~~
thingsilearned
yup.

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dpapathanasiou
There's a certain irony here: web services to prevent internet usage.

And while the whole "logging time" concept may have some appeal for HR &
accounting types (so yes, there _is_ a business model), it's hardly the kind
of inspirational startup I come here to read about.

~~~
zach
Well, there is a book about not reading books, after all.

But, like Joe Kraus likes to quote, "you make what you measure," I think
worktime analytics companies like RescueTime and 8aweek are 100%
inspirational.

To your point, you don't have to be a bean-counter to run RescueTime or
8aweek. All you need do is run it and reflect once in a while on what it tells
you.

BTW, you do need to have a certain personality to maintain a time log in
Excel. I did that for a month but was dying that I didn't have time to write
software to make it easier and more useful. It was really cool, but it was
hard because it wasn't more integrated into my workflow.

~~~
dpapathanasiou
It is inspiring if you as an individual decide you want to be more disciplined
and use a tool like this.

I was referring to their plan to sell the product to businesses, who would
then impose it on their employees en-masse.

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nanijoe
Just curious about all the YC companies that have been launching recently.
Techcrunch has all of them as being fonded on January 1 2008. Is that the date
of incorporation, or is that when they officially got together to start
developing the apps?

~~~
immad
Its a nice round number for techcrunch

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hollerith
I do not like that I cannot customize the toolbar. Not only can I not move or
delete the widgets supplied by 8aweek, I cannot even add a widget of my
choosing to the empty space on the 8aweek toolbar.

~~~
Tichy
It's definitely becoming crowded in the toolbars area. Now that I think about
it, I don't know why 8aweek needs a toolbar at all, as it is not really
interactive. An item on the menu would be sufficient.

~~~
hollerith
Well, I like having constantly in my visual field the meter that shows me how
much restricted time I have left for the day, but that requires only an inch
and a half of toolbar linear real-estate, not a whole toolbar!

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maxwell
Honestly, my first impression: "channel 8 weekly news!"

Haven't tried the toolbar yet, though. Actually, ironically, I find myself
wasting more time in Firefox (combination of slowness of the browser on my
PowerBook G4 and the extensions I have), so I've switched to Safari for the
time being. Of course, as this post demonstrates, it's not foolproof... Back
to (home)work!

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zach
It won't install on my PPC Mac running Tiger, unfortunately ("download error
(-228)"). Works fine with my Intel/Leopard MacBook, but I still kick it old
school on my desktop. Here's my User-Agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U;
PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12

~~~
zach
Works now, thanks!

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thaumaturgy
I know it's been 4 days, but ... I've also found that 8aweek is sorta handy
for keeping track of time spent on a client website.

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curi
The primary evidence that "internet addiction" is bad, or a waste of time, is
that _people like it_ more than the other things they could be doing.

Just like the primary evidence that video games are bad for children, is that
_children prefer them_ to what their parents want the children to be doing.

~~~
maxwell
It's not an internet addiction, it's market research!

