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.

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.

<sarcasm>

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>

Alas, I can't find the URL.

Also, my site (for casual games) gets nearly all of its traffic between the hours of 7:00 AM and 7:00 PM, Mon-Fri. The most popular time period seems to be Tuesdays from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM. Gee, I wonder what they're (avoiding) doing...

http://workfriendly.net/

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.

That assumes that pg (or any other person funding a company) is an oracle of what will make the company successful. The reality is that pg et al. are going to succeed by being good judges of founder character. Once they have the right founders, the founders themselves will figure out what it best to make their business suceed and pg wealthier.

In a sense I am, actually, because I know my (or anyone's) predictive ability is no substitute for watching actual users. So I tell everyone: launch quickly, listen to your users, and iterate rapidly. And that rule, so far as it goes, is a recipe for being successful.

I ignore it when I'm in the middle of commenting on a bunch of threads (like now), but I usually heed it when I come back to news.YC in the middle of the day. I just wait for it to expire before visiting and checking links...I figure not that much can happen in half a day.

I would take on this project if I had any time, which I probably waste now... hmmm... ;)

...

"Or click this link to buy quality merchandise at Amazon"

Something is wrong with that picture.

Dunno about others, but I tend to go from one form of procrastination to another.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114401

I've certainly started visiting Programming Reddit more since visiting news.YC less. OTOH, I don't think it makes up for the full difference, and my startup has gotten the balance of that time. That could be because the startup is more mature and hence more fun to work on now, though.

I had the crazy idea (since my startup is all about casual games) that instead of blocking people from playing games all day, you should just turn their daily work into a game. Carrot, instead of stick. Don't really know how the specifics would work, but it's something I'd like to play with as our game-creation software gets more mature.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143...

about using games to get people to do useful computation

Isn't that the whole point of RescueTime and 8aweek? Although I admit that the game is probably less fun if your boss is grading the high-score table.

Eventually it settled in that I couldn't go there, and I haven't wasted time on there since. Its a great feeling and I get way more done.

Editing the host file was a pain though, and was a cold-turkey cutoff. That's where the idea for 8aweek came. We want everyone to be able to control their bad habits, but in a nice feature rich app, and not some hack in your system's files.

Hope you try it out. Let us know if it worked for you and what would help.

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.

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.

I believe 8aweek's name is derived from such a study, in fact.

Wasting time online is a universal problem that is only getting worse.

I will give it a go to see if it gets me being more productive.

I'm running it and it works well.

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...

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.

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.

I was referring to their plan to sell the product to businesses, who would then impose it on their employees en-masse.

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!

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.