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

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/15/8aweek-to-help-you-kick-that-internet-time-wasting-addiction/

by alaskamiller • 18 years ago

50 59 18 years ago

dcurtis3• 18 years ago

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.

pg3• 18 years ago

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.

yters3• 18 years ago

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.

dcurtis3• 18 years ago

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.

edw519• 18 years ago

"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>

eusman• 18 years ago

"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.

DarrenStuart4• 18 years ago

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.

Alex3917• 18 years ago

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.

Tichy3• 18 years ago

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.

nanijoe2• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

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

aneesh• 18 years ago

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.

Tichy3• 18 years ago

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.

garbowza4• 18 years ago

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.

hollerith3• 18 years ago

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

nanijoe2• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

Its a nice round number for techcrunch

dpapathanasiou2• 18 years ago

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.

jmzachary• 18 years ago

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.

zach3• 18 years ago

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.

dpapathanasiou2• 18 years ago

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.

wallflower• 18 years ago

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

donal2• 18 years ago

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.

nostrademons4• 18 years ago

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.

donal2• 18 years ago

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...

zach3• 18 years ago

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

zach3• 18 years ago

Works now, thanks!

hollerith3• 18 years ago

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.

Tichy3• 18 years ago

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.

hollerith3• 18 years ago

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!

curi2• 18 years ago

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.

maxwell2• 18 years ago

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

maxwell2• 18 years ago

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!

thaumaturgy• 18 years ago

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.

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

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