Most people start their day in the office by reading the news online. Each person may have a favorite site that aggregates the news You read the lists of articles and then click on the link that you find interesting. The problem is that on each news page there are multiple links to other sources of information.
You may start off reading a story about a river rising causing flooding and the page could have an add for river rafting trips. You click on the link which takes you to a river rafting site. Before you know it, you are looking at pictures from last seasons guided trips. This causes you to waste time reading something that you were not interested in when you started to read the news.
A link may take you to interesting pages that are not important.
To solve this problem, browsers like Google Chrome should allow you to set up boundaries on what you read. Here is how it would work. You choose one or two sites that you want to read during the day. Google Chrome should allow you to go to your favorite news sites and to follow links away from the news site. As soon as you click on a link on the news article that would take you to a third page, the browser would delay the loading of the page by 30 seconds. If the link is really important. You will read it. If the link is not that important, you will probably have gotten back to work by the time the page opens.
Google Chrome prevents you from wasting time online.
By setting up the boundaries ahead of time, you make a promise to yourself before you have the temptation about clicking on something that would just waste your time. This feature would ultimately save you time by limiting your Internet usage to just reading the news during working hours. The same technique could be used for Facebook. You could decide that you only want to spend 30 minutes on Facebook during the day. A timer would keep track each time you log on and would tell you how many minutes you have left. At the end of 30 minutes you have to wait until the next day to find out what your friends had for dinner.
1 comment:
I'm not sure that Google Chrome, or any internet browser provider, would want to assist the users in abstaining from using its service. Especially when a good portion of their user revenue rates and advertising fees are based on the amount time people "surf the web" using their product. This model would be similar to a television network blocking access to its channel and programming (and advertising) when a viewer flips away during a commercial break. There's really no incentive to deny access to the service that provides revenue. Perhaps this idea could be developed as an application or program that one could install on their children's computers (or their employee’s computers) to improve productivity and discourage mindless "into the rabbit hole" web surfing...
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