by Puller

Created on: March 31, 2008   Last Updated: March 01, 2010

The Internet was first used to connect people, it was used for collaboration. Today you can still collaborate on the Internet but in many different ways. Collaboration on the Internet has changed from discussing research to discussing parties and events now with websites like Facebook. The Internet is a great source with almost an unlimited amount of information but also an unlimited amount of ways to waste your time. From flash games to paid survey sites which pay you in the hundredth of a cent, millions of people are wasting time online. Then on the flip side, the Internet is becoming a place for productivity to flourish with websites like Google Documents (http://docs.google.com/) and Zoho (http://www.zoho.com/) where people can collaborate and write documents together online.

The question we need to ask ourselves is if the Internet is hindering our productivity or helping us? I am sure most students love the Internet, its an amazing information resource when doing research projects. Students parents only wished they had Google around when they had to do school work. But then if your like me your probably researching a little then on Facebook a little then back to researching. That pattern tends to continue till I either need sleep or the homework is done. I personally am a statisticsjunky and was curios to how much time I was wasting on the Internet. I know I waste a ton of time, I wasn't planning on finding out if I was productive or not online, I already knew I wasn't.

I needed a way to track my Internet usage. To measure our productivity online we need to track how long we spend on each website, and a way to group the websites in categories such as productive and non-productive. After being able to group and track the websites we need a nice way to visualize our data to easily see how badly we use our time because less face it most of us are not as productive online as we should be. Now that we have this general idea how can we easily do all this? Well fear not I have done all the Googling for you and have found the best solution for tracking our productivity on the Internet.

not using it at the time To help us out we will use a website and program called Rescue Time. And before anyone starts to worry this will work with any computer, Microsoft, Mac, and even Linux! Rescue Time will not only track our productivity online but also on our computer. Basically this is how it works, you first go to their website (http://www.rescuetime.com) and sign up. Once

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>