This Program Silently Judges You When You Waste Time Online Find yourself browsing Facebook, memes and funny videos way more than you should? Here's a painless solution.
By Rustam Singh
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Computers are brilliant but distracting machines. When you have the power of the entire collective intelligence of our entire civilization possess within a few clicks of your mouse, the possibilities of getting disused are endless. It starts with an innocent research based check on a programmer or a CEO, and five minutes later you're on Wikipedia finding exactly why the sky is blue or on WebMD searching what does an appendix exactly do and if that pimple can be cancerous or not. From infinite cat memes to funny fail videos, let's face it, the internet is full of distractions and even the most focused employees can get off track easily.
Firewalls are an easy solution to your business and work machine. You can simply block all access to distracting websites including social media, YouTube, adult content, memes or other junk. However, in the rare occasion you need to monitor or research based on social media or any of the other distractive websites, bypassing the firewall is a lengthy and troublesome process. Further, blocking access might lead to employees feeling bad and forced to work too much. Physically monitoring every screen is impossible. Key logging and spy checks would be an intrusion to employee privacy and a waste of your personal time. The solution might just be this nifty moral self-check based AutoHotKey software that gently reminds the user to get back to work.
Polite nudging
Unlike shooting alarms or popup banners or highlighting your or your employees habit to switch tabs or software windows to non-work related activities, this silent timer will just hover on the screen. The mere presence of the clock ticking away showing how much time you've wasted will convert your own sense of goodwill to get back to work.
Silent motivator
Instead of harassing or forcing you to get back to work, the timer is really good as politely motivating you to do the right thing. There is no backlog or tracks and no witness to your folly, except yourself. Would you be able to stand the harshest judge of your behavior – yourself?
Customizable to include alters, logs and alarms
You can obviously code (or seek help of the millions of coders online who would be happy to help you out, often without any fees) in customizing the hotkey to include alarms when, let's say, it's been ten minutes outside work. Or you can have a silent log emailed to your administrator of your daily amount of distractions. Alternatively, you can even have a loud alarm that rings after x amount of time, shaming the distracted employee, if you want to play the tough card.
Check out the HotKey script at http://neilblr.com/post/58757345346
It's free, non ad sponsored, doesn't slow your computer down and labeled spamware free. You can also compile it yourself if you have basic programming knowledge since the author has given the source code right up there.
What's your secret to stop yourself formt he infinite distractions of the internet? Let us know in the comments on our official Facebook page BIZ Experiences India
