TimeStats Tracks How Much Time You Spend On Web Sites

Chrome: We keep reading about how much time we spend watching YouTube videos or goofing off on social networks. If you really want to calculate your own usage, timeStats is the easiest way to get actual figures in Chrome — and you can impose restrictions on yourself too.

Setup is simple. You can log into Facebook to share your timeStats on your wall, but this is optional so feel free to skip it. A basic pie chart of statistics is delivered through a dropdown dialog box from the extension’s toolbar icon, showing your browsing patterns. Detailed stats are available as well, which show you almost anything you might want to know about your internet usage.

But the cool part of timeStats comes in the “Alerts” section, where you can set a limit on certain web sites. So for example, if you spend too much time on Facebook, you can set it so that Facebook can be accessed only for one hour in a day — beyond that hour, timeStats will automatically block it. There’s also an option to go back to the site for another hour after rewriting a chunk of hard text, or guilt-tripping yourself with a notification timer that monitors the minutes spent on Facebook in a day.

Currently, timeStats is restricted only to your usage of Google Chrome locally — if you use Chrome across two different machines, it won’t sync your stats. And it doesn’t track how you are using your computer apart from that. For such detailed insights, you will need to turn to the more powerful RescueTime to analyse your entire personal computing habits.

timeStats [Chrome Web Store via I Love Free Software]