New YC Company 8aweek To Help You Kick That Internet Time Wasting Addiction | Hacker News Reader

New YC Company 8aweek To Help You Kick That Internet Time Wasting Addiction

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50 pointsalaskamiller59 comments

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.

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.

"dealing with it will be a big business"

Which may open up opportunities for the next round of startups: Workarounds to avoid HR mandated implementations of RescueTime and 8aweek.

In all my visits to client sites in the past 5 years, I would safely venture that 50% of all the time (that I've observed) spent by office workers is spent surfing the internet. I don't know why. Maybe they're bored. Maybe they don't have enough to do. Maybe they don't care. Maybe they lack guidance and direction (my guess).

I've often said that someone should develop a service that feeds selected content to a browser and looks exactly like outlook. The next killer app for bored workers and their PHBs. Would also save health care costs associated with sore fingers from "alt-tabbing" whenever the boss walks by.

</sarcasm>

It's been done before...I've seen a site that's like a browsing proxy, but it strips out all the stylesheets from a website and then substitutes one that looks exactly like MS Word. So you've got this word-processing document with the text of whatever you're really looking at.

Alas, I can't find the URL.

Also, my site (for casual games) gets nearly all of its traffic between the hours of 7:00 AM and 7:00 PM, Mon-Fri. The most popular time period seems to be Tuesdays from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM. Gee, I wonder what they're (avoiding) doing...

Alas, I can't find the URL.

http://workfriendly.net/

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.

I mean, it's in your best interest to push the funded companies into success by suggesting new/complementary features.

That assumes that pg (or any other person funding a company) is an oracle of what will make the company successful. The reality is that pg et al. are going to succeed by being good judges of founder character. Once they have the right founders, the founders themselves will figure out what it best to make their business suceed and pg wealthier.

That assumes that pg (or any other person funding a company) is an oracle of what will make the company successful.

In a sense I am, actually, because I know my (or anyone's) predictive ability is no substitute for watching actual users. So I tell everyone: launch quickly, listen to your users, and iterate rapidly. And that rule, so far as it goes, is a recipe for being successful.

Addiction probably won't be fixed by 8aweek, but for alot of self improvement types, like myself, I can definitely see how it'll help me shape my own behaviour.

"Can anyone share how much they ignore noprocrast?"

I ignore it when I'm in the middle of commenting on a bunch of threads (like now), but I usually heed it when I come back to news.YC in the middle of the day. I just wait for it to expire before visiting and checking links...I figure not that much can happen in half a day.

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

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... ;)

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.

Sounds like a job for a web proxy. One that showed an ad on the "Get back to work" page could pay for itself.

"Get back to Work!"

...

"Or click this link to buy quality merchandise at Amazon"

Something is wrong with that picture.

Have people had success with the no procrastinate feature here?

Dunno about others, but I tend to go from one form of procrastination to another.

I had some limited success with a 10 hours noprocrast timeout. It broke the addiction, at least, so I only check in the morning and night now. You're right though, you really need to find something to replace old procrastination habits with, otherwise you'll just pick up new ones.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114401

I've certainly started visiting Programming Reddit more since visiting news.YC less. OTOH, I don't think it makes up for the full difference, and my startup has gotten the balance of that time. That could be because the startup is more mature and hence more fun to work on now, though.

I had the crazy idea (since my startup is all about casual games) that instead of blocking people from playing games all day, you should just turn their daily work into a game. Carrot, instead of stick. Don't really know how the specifics would work, but it's something I'd like to play with as our game-creation software gets more mature.

That's a neat idea. If it is true that humans are better at solving certain problems than computers, maybe games could represent problems that the computer can't solve easily. Just think if the WoW fanbase were really number crunching!

you gotta watch this:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143...

about using games to get people to do useful computation

So that's where the image labeling game came from! Nice find.

instead of blocking people from playing games all day, you should just turn their daily work into a game.

Isn't that the whole point of RescueTime and 8aweek? Although I admit that the game is probably less fun if your boss is grading the high-score table.

For the past 2 years I've had great success through editing my hosts file, blocking me from seeing the sties that I tent to get addicted to. It was interesting (and scary) at first. For the first month I would still go to digg 6 times a day, subconciously even though I knew it was blocked.

Eventually it settled in that I couldn't go there, and I haven't wasted time on there since. Its a great feeling and I get way more done.

Editing the host file was a pain though, and was a cold-turkey cutoff. That's where the idea for 8aweek came. We want everyone to be able to control their bad habits, but in a nice feature rich app, and not some hack in your system's files.

Hope you try it out. Let us know if it worked for you and what would help.

"there will be room for many slightly differing approaches"

I agree

Also, although RT and 8AW seem different, assuming they are funded under the same roof, I wouldn't be surprised if they merged. RT will appeal more to busy people/professionals, whereas I see 8AW reaching younger crowd.

Also keep in mind we've only been launched for a few hours now. Being a toolbar provides us the opportunity to do some clever things, which we have planned. So as we roll out these features the differences will be more apparent.

Is there any research to back the time-suck problem up?

Companies will just fire users with a problem so there is no business us for it.

Having 2 companies taking different approaches is fine but I am not convinced this is big business at all.

Is there any research to back the time-suck problem up?

I believe 8aweek's name is derived from such a study, in fact.

well after much googling I couldn't find any reference to it. Can anyone help me out, it appears my google ninja skills are not up to it for this. Paul you invested in them maybe you can point us in the right direction. I am still not convinced this is a problem.

Check our FAQ page: http://www.8aweek.com/learn/

Wasting time online is a universal problem that is only getting worse.

thanks, for those who want the url its http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN2541395620...

I will give it a go to see if it gets me being more productive.

Employee efficiency is big business. Companies aren't going to fire you for spending a bit of time on CNN or Facebook, but I guarantee you they wouldn't mind getting a bit more of that time back. Every minute gained is a competitive advantage.

trust me companies that monitor their employees online time will fire employees caught surfing to much after a couple of times. The person surfing the net to long is not working and thats the end of the story for these companies.

I really like 8aweek, I am using it right now, and yet I would probably never use RescueTime. Hard to explain why since they are almost the same, but one hits the sweet spot for me in terms of aesthetics and functionality whereas the other does not.

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.

Actually, RescueTime IS available for Linux (not directly from the RescueTime folks). Check out: https://launchpad.net/rescuetime-linux-uploader

I'm running it and it works well.

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

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

yup.

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.

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.

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.

I agree with you, on both counts. It seems very ironic to have a toolbar app that monitors and prevents your use of the web. This is a behavioral problem (procrastination, time wasting, boredom, poor management), not a technical problem. This seems like a simple feature that browser developers could easily build in.

From my psychology reading, that what we measure tends to improve. So, measuring anything is an important step to improving.

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?

Its a nice round number for techcrunch

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.

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.

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!

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!

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

Works now, thanks!

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.

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.

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

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