Crenk

For those us who desk jockey, day in and day out, it’s tough to stay focused on work all day long. A few of us get sidetracked to read personal email or do personal web searches in order to break the monotony of the daily grind.

Here are a 4 Firefox plug-ins to keep track of that time and stay on task. Nothing is worse than realizing that you just blew an entire day on surfing rather than working. Keep these tools close at hand to prevent any effects on your job performance.

1. MeeTimer
MeeTimer is probably one of the most effective plug-ins for tracking time that I have found. MeeTimer will not only time your time wasting, but also can provide you a report where you spend your time to give you a better idea of how to properly make corrections. The thoroughness of this plug-in can truly assist in correcting time wasting habits. Warnings have also been placed to warn you prior to going to a new address or loading a new tab.

2. TimeTracker
TimeTracker is a comparable plug-in to MeeTimer in terms of usefulness. TimeTracker is much simpler, and focuses more on tracking your time, as opposed to providing direct reports. Still this plug-in offers some attractive additions. TimeTracker allows you to input “work” sites that should not count towards the tracking, so your clock will actually stop as long as you are on those listed sties. Time also pauses when you are taking a break from surfing, and the clock will provide you a daily report as to where you are spending your time. You can reset your clock daily or track an entire work week, depending on your needs.

3. LeechBlock
The LeechBlock plug-in comes at you with an interesting approach. It asks you to type in all the sites you want blocked. That’s right, it will block from sites, and it even allows you to designate days and times to keep them blocked from you. An interesting approach, but I would have far too many sites to include on that list. I like the approach of TimeTracker much better by adding the sites that you actually need for work, as those are sure to be fewer and easier to remember. It also tracks your time to provide you with an accurate view of where you spend your time.

4. Procrastato
This plug-in cuts to the chase! No fancy reports, no time tracking, it doesn’t even care if you like the way it works or not. Procrastato does one thing, and one thing very well. Once you input the sites you spend most time on, the plugin will monitor you very effectively. Spending more time than you should on any of the listed sites and you get smacked down with a massive alert informing you that you are wasting time and they are watching (not literally watching you but the eyes they show you are creepy). If that does not disrupt your time wasting, then you are doomed to waste time forever!

Photo Credit, sugu

ReminderFox

This neat little plug-in goes for simplicity. While not necessarily an official “to-do” application, I find it almost necessary for those that seem to forget the important dates. People that forget birthdays, anniversaries, parties, and other date based events, ReminderFox will send out an alarm or an alert to remind you of what’s coming up. This plug-in has no aspirations to be a full calendar application, but rather makes its home at the bottom right of your browser ready to announce the days you NEED to remember!

ToDo Cue (experimental)
ToDo Cue unfortunately was very buggy in my use of this plug-in. It relies on the user creating simple, let me stress that again…simple, to-do lists. Once installed a side bar will appear in both your Gmail and Gcal accounts with the lists of things to-do in priority order. I was only able to get sustainable functionality with the older version of Gmail, which did me little good as I have updated it. There are a lot of other tools that do the same with better results. This plug-in needs more work, but remember, it is still labeled experimental, just not sure if it will ever be ready.

Todo Reminder
I found this to be the plug-in with the most potential. Currently the plug-in is very effective with event reminders. Things like parties, birthdays, get togethers, anniversaries, etc. What I loved about it is that alerts not only come via email, but you can set yourself up with SMS alerts. If more than one person is involved, take it further by setting up group alerts. This will make sure everyone is on task and aware of what is coming up. I especially found the one mouse click addition through emails and pages very effective when needing to list something quickly. The site says further development is needed, but I think this little plug-in has a great future in the productivity field.

Delegate to Remember the Milk
A lot of you have heard of Remember the Milk. If you’ve not, no worries, Remember the Milk (RtM) is simply another way to create your to-do lists with functionality with both web apps and mobile apps. There are a great number of power users for RtM, and as such, this plug-in is very popular. For starters, if you follow the GTD (Getting Things Done) philosophy, then this plug-in will be very effective. A “remember” button is added to all of your emails for quick task managing directly from you email. No bothering with cut and paste, simply click and the message is tasked into your RtM account. Yes, it’s that simple!

GTD Inbox
GTD Inbox is a plug-in that tries to do a whole lot. Unfortunately in this endeavor it tends to fail on a lot of fronts. This plug-in completely changes the face of your Gmail inbox by adding the functionality of GTD (mentioned above). For hardcore GTD’ers, the layout will be very familiar with intuitive clicks to productively manage all of your information. Similar to the RtM plug-in, you have a button that will take your emails and place them into your task list. You have the ability to create labels, ticklers, and build the productivity method that best suits your needs. This productivity juggaurnaut is definitely not an entry level “to-do” plug-in and may confuse first time users of GTD. A little buggy with newer versions of Gmail, but useful if you can understand it.

There are more I am sure, and even more being created for Firefox 3, but share your favorite To-Do Plug-ins here and let’s all get more done.

For nearly the last two years I have been blogging, writing nearly a thousand articles.  Lots of time, energy and creativity go into these words I write, and I publish them in the hopes that others will not only read them, but enjoy them, apply them and leave comments or ask questions.  The one evil of the Internet is Spam though, and over the last few years Spam bots have been attacking blogs like no other.  This is partly due to the number of new blogs being created.

The problem is comment spam.  These are comments that are left on articles that usually point to some website that tells you how she’d like you to be thicker and longer lasting, or how to find a great deal on your next new car.  Nothing of value, in face, these types of comments detract from the credibility of your content and worse, possibly lead to your readers leaving from clicking on a bogus link.  There is help.

Shortly after one particular article got bombarded with tons of traffic from several social bookmarking and networking sites at once, the comment spam started to roll in.  Using WordPress, my preferred platform for blogging, I set out to find some sort of Captcha system to add to blog posts to help cut down on the spam.  Generally speaking, I don’t like anything that interferes with a users experience, but this plug-in is a must have.

Did you pass math? adds a small math question to the bottom of your comment box, above the submit button.  It prompts the commentator to do a very simple math equation, like 7+3= [fill in the answer].   The plug-in can be found here: http://www.herod.net/dypm/ - and while it hasn’t been updated in two years, I don’t see that as a problem, it simply works.  To install it, simply download to your computer from their site, unzip the files and upload [via FTP] two PHP files (English is default, but support is there for dozens more).  Login to the admin section of WordPress, activate the plugin and you are done.

Since installing the Did you pass math plug-in, my comment spam has been near completely eliminated.  As an added bonus, there was zero negative feedback and no backlash from the my readers after installing.  Some even thanked me for not using a true Captcha system, since they can often be very hard to read.  My suggestion would be to install this when first setting up a blog, so you aren’t in a situation like me, trying to fix a broken problem while it is being broken even harder.