Do you spend too much time online? Or just Just the right amount, perhaps? If you’re looking for that Goldilocks factor in your online usage, Timestats might be just the thing you are looking for.
Timestats is a Chrome extension that will keep track of your time spent online and help you manage it better by being more aware of what you spend your time on. It collects data and displays it in a variety of snazzy statistical reports.
Timestats has got plenty of options and features, as well as first rate (though simple) graphics and interface.
If you’re one among the millions that spend a significant amount of time online, you may have wondered at some point or another just how much time you are spending at any specific site, task or pursuit. Timestats is a great extension for your Chrome browser that will help you be more efficient with your time spent online, by tracking each of the sites you visit and recording the time factors you invest in each of them. It will then show you, in numerous ways, a graphic readout (pretty pictures!) of your ‘time stats’ so you can make determinations about where you’re spending too much or too little time.
Since I spend so much of my life in the realm of cyberspace, I thought this would be an interesting one to check out, and I was definitely not disappointed. Installation is fast and easy, as with any good Chrome extension, and you’re using it within moments of clicking the install button. You’ll then see a small icon in your browser menu bar that shows how much active time you have spent on the current page you are viewing. The thing worth noting here is that Timestats, according to what I was able to observe, only records your active time on a page. For instance, when I opened a particular page, read it for a few moments, and then walked away from the keyboard for ten minutes, I came back and found that Timestats had only recorded one minute of time spent on the page. Somehow, it seems, it knows how much time you spend actually viewing the page or not. This is a great feature that makes Timestats far more useful than it would have been otherwise.
Once you’ve built up some stats to look at, you’ll be spoiled for choice as far as how to view them. Clicking the icon on the menu bar will bring up a brief list of options for how you want to examine your stats, and pressing any of those options will bring up the main viewing window. The main window is absolutely jam-packed with different displays showing things like time spent per page, time spent per category, and others. Each of the views has its own advantages, like a pie chart or a line graph. Additionally there are other option pages that will let you do almost anything you can think of or would want, like adding or removing subdomains that should be tracked separate from their main hosting sites.
I didn’t find any particular downsides to using this extension. Even the amount of CPU power that it uses is very low. The amount of RAM it uses is pretty low in general, but running it for a long time will begin to eat up a bit more memory so bear that in mind. I ran it for eight hours straight before I saw it’s memory usage increase in any significant way. I’d recommend this extension for absolutely anyone that wants to know more about their own time spent online, as well as those who want to track the time spent by others on any particular machine. Until next time, my friends!
- Get Timestats here.
