You’re stepping as quietly as possible … slowly, purposefully … tiptoeing through the cyberforest in your boots and fatigues… looking for bent clock-hands and footprints in the cosmic dust that might indicate where your working time escaped to!
We’ve got five great tools that make time-hunting less of a specialized skill. Rather than stepping quietly through the woods, searching for time-droppings and hour-tracks, they create a nice wide bitumen road, with clear green-and-white signs to follow!
This way to working efficiency!
Hit the jump to check them out.
1. We won’t make you wait for the best of these apps – we know how busy you are! LeechBlock is an add-on for Firefox that will block your own personal trouble sites, during working hours only. Of course, you can un-block them relatively easily … but that requires a little more thought about what you are doing.
Leechblock screenshot
Up to six sets of sites can be blocked, and you can set a time period and days for each site to be off limits. Alternatively, you can limit your time on these sites – so if you need to check facebook for work networking (uh huh! Sure you do!), you can set yourself a twenty minute limit between 9am and 5pm.
Leaving a tab open with a site in it doesn’t contribute to the time limit – you can set an idle time in Leechblock, so that if the phone rings, all your precious youtube time isn’t wasted at once 
. The vast majority of users gave this add-on a 5-star review.
2. Timetracker is another Firefox add-on, however this one is a simpler tool, just for analysis and later mental hand-slapping for wasting so much time. This app was named download of the day on Lifehacker, the number 2 blog in the whole wide world.
It tracks browsing time across sessions, pausing the timer automatically when you switch to another tab. It also calculates how much time you have spent on certain sites since the add-on was installed. Excluding a couple of bugs, most users give this time saving application four to five stars.
Don't get sucked into the 'white hole' of your computer screen...
3. Plenty of sites are proud that they are time-wasters. Thumbs down!! 8aWeek is the antidote to sites like StumbleUpon, Facebook and Digg, as well as time-wasting news and opinion sites, with time-tracking options as well as optional site blocking capabilities. You can have it either in Countdown mode, where it will send you alerts for how long you’ve been on a particular site, or in Block mode, where access is simply denied. Go do your work, and try again later!
8aWeek incorporates the Read It Later plugin for Firefox – a handy tool that saves you cluttering up your bookmarks folder with single-use pages … and also saves you wasyting time on things you simply must look at now!
8aWeek Time Saving Software
4. Rescuetime is an app similar to Leechblocker and 8aWeek, however desktop applications are monitored also. So if your weakness is not Facebook, but Freecell, Rescuetime is the time saving solution for you. You can tag and group programs within Rescuetime, and it can be easily turned on and off. For browsers, this program also tracks what domains you are surfing.
Time is only tracked for the application you have in focus, however, there doesn’t seem to be an automatic pause – if you don’t want the programs you have open at lunchtime to count towards your total, you need to manually turn it off.
Rescuetime
5. If you haven’t yet seen the light, and are still using Internet Explorer rather than Firefox, the time police have solutions for you also! IEHistoryView is a tiny program that allows you to track what sites have been visited in Internet Explorer, and how long was spent at each one. This can be tracked for several different users, if you have networked computers, and the program has an intuitive interface for Windows users.
IE HistoryView - why limit time-saving to Firefox users?
