The Internet is a wonderful thing. So wonderful, in fact, that often I find myself completely sidetracked from what I am supposed to be doing. “I’ll just kill a few minutes before I get back to work,” I tell myself, or “I’ll just watch a few clips from the Colbert Report.”
Before I know it I’ve run out of YouTube videos or new articles on Digg and it is 3 hours later. Needless to say no work is getting done.
The solution to this dilemma is a little discipline and self-control. Since I am a programmer, though, I refuse to do anything myself that can be automated. I decided to put together a Firefox extension to give me friendly, regular reminders that I should be getting back to work.
The result is Procrastato.
It seems to be working, so I’m releasing it to the public in beta.
The current version is 0.7.0
It works with Firefox 2.x and Firefox 3 beta.
All you have to do is install the plugin and enter in ten sites you tend to use when you are procrastinating instead of doing work. The defaults are the ones I tend to use. You can also change the time period that Procrastato waits before checking on you. Procrastato works just fine with tabs, so don’t think you can hide Reddit behind 20 productive tabs.
If a lot of people like it, or if I get some free time, I’ll continue to add features and fix any bugs.
Attention Firefox extension developers – I’ve added Procrastato to the sandbox at addons.mozilla.org. I would appreciate any comments / ratings there, to help move this extension along toward the public list.
[survey_fly]