Minutes Please: Control How Much Time You Spend Online

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 14 May 2009

Spending time online may prove to be a good thing, as long as you use the internet to get the latest news (software news for example) or download some handy apps to use on your system. Visiting sites like YouTube and Facebook can even boos your productivity at the workplace, a study has recently revealed, but the thing is that your web browsing breaks must be short. With Minutes Please you can ensure that you will spend only as much time as you want on a particular web page – no more “oh no, I’ve spent 3 and a half hours on this page” surprises.

Minutes Please works in a very straightforward manner: you visit the Minutes Please web page (click here), you type in the web page you wish to visit, specify the amount of time you want to spend on that site, check the “get a X minute warning” if you want to, and click “Please”. You will then be directed to the web page you specified; but that web page will be closed when the amount of time you fed into Minutes Please expires. Just to make sure you know how much browsing time you have left, the Minutes Please tab displays a timer (at least it did in my Firefox 3.0.10 browser).

That is on way of using Minutes Please, but there are two other ways you can take advantage of this online service:

1. Change the URL of the site you wish to visit. For the site example.com, this means turning that URL into something like:
5.minutesplease.com/example.com
minutesplease.com/1hr15m/example.com
minutesplease.com/1day/ (opens a blank window)
minutesplease.com/example.com (defaults to 10 m)

2. Use the bookmarklet provided by Minutes Please; it lest you instantly set a 10 minute limit for any page you want to visit. This means visiting the Minutes Please web page and bookmaking the link provided there.

Another online service that is similar to Minutes Please is Keep Me Out – a detailed article on Keep Me Out is available here.


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