Mind the Time by Paul Morris

Keep track of how much time you spend on the web, and where you spend it. A toolbar ticker shows the time spent at the current site or the total time spent on the web today. A summary page sums up data for the past 70 days, 10 weeks, and 6 months.

4.3 (130 reviews)

3,793 Users

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About this extension

The Ticker

The badge on the toolbar button shows the time spent at the current site (the default) or the total time spent on the web today. There is an option for selecting which.

This ticker shows the time in minutes. More than 59 minutes is shown as H:MM, for example 1:05 for 1 hour, 5 minutes.

Click the toolbar button for a panel that shows both the time spent on the current site today and the total time spent on the web today (H:MM / H:MM). Use the panel to open the summary page or change the timing mode:

Grey mode (default): timing is automatically paused after 30 seconds of inactivity and starts up again when activity resumes (e.g. when the mouse pointer moves inside the browser window).
Green mode: keep timing despite periods of inactivity. This makes it easy to keep the timer on while watching videos.
Blue mode: only log the total time for each day and don't log which websites were visited or how much time was spent on each of them.
Timer off mode: no time or websites are logged. The button badge is not shown.

Reminder Messages

Receive periodic reminder messages (after every X minutes) to help keep you aware of how much time you have spent on the web. Turn these on and set the frequency under options.

The Summary Page

The summary page reports how much time you have spent, and where you have spent it, for today and the past 70 days. This includes weekly summaries of the past 10 weeks and monthly summaries of the past 6 months.

There is an option to change when a new day begins (for night owls who stay up past midnight).

All data is stored locally on your computer. When data is more than 70 days old it is automatically deleted. Under options there is a button to delete all data.

White List

Under options you can enter a list of sites to prevent them from being logged, and any time spent on them from being counted. This lets you exclude work-related sites, for example.

Known Issues

Occasionally the idle timeout does not work correctly and too much time is logged for a given site. This appears to be a problem with Firefox's browser extensions API. See this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1383244 A workaround is to minimize or otherwise "unfocus" Firefox before leaving the computer idle.

Contributions

If you use and like this add-on, a small contribution or a favorable review would be greatly appreciated.

Mind the Time received an honorable mention in the Amp Your Firefox Contest of 2013.

Developer comments

Known Issues

Currently time and websites are logged for private browsing windows. This is due to a current known limitation in Firefox's browser extensions API. See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/manifest.json/incognito
Occasionally the idle timeout does not work correctly and too much time is logged for a given site. This appears to be caused by a problem in Firefox's browser extensions API. See this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1383244 A workaround is to minimize or otherwise "unfocus" Firefox before leaving the computer idle.
When watching YouTube, Vimeo, and other (?) videos in full screen mode, time is not logged.
When the add-on is uninstalled, data is not deleted, due to a Firefox bug. You can manually delete all data under preferences on the summary page, before uninstalling.
Version 1.2.0 had a bug where in some cases data might not appear on the summary page when upgrading from version 1.1. This was fixed in 1.2.1.
Version 0.4.12 had a bug with the preference for the number of minutes to be logged between each reminder message. It would not update immediately when changed. This was fixed in 0.4.13.
Version 0.4.9 had a bug where the ticker would sometimes not display correctly on Windows. This was fixed in 0.4.12.

Want to help develop Mind the Time?

The code is open-source (under MPL 2.0). See https://github.com/PaulMorris/mind-the-time Feel free to send me an email. My address is my first name at my first name then my middle initial "w" then my last name dot com.

Rated 4.3 by 130 reviewers

Release notes for 2.3.0

Version 2.3.0 (June 21, 2020)

- Now allows downloading data as a JSON file. Available from the bottom of the summary page. Many thanks to Will Stedden for the contribution that provided this frequently requested feature.

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