One of the easiest ways that we can waste our time on is by browsing aimlessly without having defined intentions. Our habits determine are the behaviors that we are doing most of the time and taking the time to build better habits will most likely lead to better lives. This includes building better habits online. A Chrome extension from Stanford is to help us with that.
HabitLab is an open source project that tracks the time we spend on different sites like Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and gives us the opportunity to list the sites which we want to reduce the time we spend on. Then, HabitLab will choose an intelligent way to help you with that, such as hiding the Facebook news feed, hiding comments on YouTube, asking you to write a goal why are we opening Gmail before allowing us to open it, and many others, just to help us cut off the time we may consider as wasted.
Instead, we can actually invest that time into reading books, spending time with our loved ones, or simply doing something more productive rather than wasting it. There are only 24 hours in a day and the more effort that we put on intentionally using them in the pursuit of our goals, the more likely it is for us to accomplish them and live better lives.
If a particular intervention is something that we do not prefer to have it in our browser, then we can simply disable it.
It is important to know that data on effectiveness will be recorded for research purposes.
HabitLab is an open source project and you can view and contribute to its code on GitHub.
If you see yourself wasting a lot of time online, then give this extension a try and see how it goes. I hope you find it useful.
