I have found at times in my life that I spend way too much time on YouTube or related sites. Clicking on the next interesting (or not really) video, because I just didn’t want to get to work. However, it always happens that when I intended to spend 5 minutes (or 30 minutes) that I look at the clock after a while and realize it has been 2 hours (or more)!
I chose to write a script using AutoHotkey to help me keep better track of my time.
The basic concept is to use a WinWaitActive followed by a WinWaitNotActive with a timeout to start a timer when I open the page, but let the script continue once I’ve spent long enough on the page.
WinWaitActive, YouTube
WinWaitNotActive, YouTube,, 600 ; 10 min in seconds
Then, if the timeout on the WaitNotActive occured, I want to show an alert (if we proceed past that point without a timeout, that means I’ve changed the active window and must not be vegging). To make it system modal, we use the options parameter and set it to 4096
if ErrorLevel
{
MsgBox, 4096, Is there something else you need to be doing?, Hey`, you've been watching youtube for a bit . . .
}
To keep it running, I added an infinite loop around these three lines; changed to using the Group concept in AHK so that I could specify multiple flavors of the windows I wanted to keep a tab on time while open (I eventually added Netflix to this list as well); made a variable for the time to wait before showing an alert and put it at the top for easy edit; added some comments; and, finally, utilized FanaticGuru’s Centered_MsgBox (renamed) to have it show up on top of the time waisting window.
(you will need to install Autohotkey to run this code - it is possible to distribute compiled versions, but (a) you shouldn’t trust them and (b) gh-pages would complain at me for hosting binary files)
(To Download: Click Here)