When you organize something you learn about it. This goes for lots of things. And one way to learn a whole lot is to organize yourself and your on-line activities.
For many — and this may be especially true if your work is primarily done on-line — your computer is at once an incredibly useful tool and a powerfully tempting source of distractions.
You probably know what I mean, right? You’re working away on a blog post and you want to say something about a book that you recently read. You search for it on-line and find the Kindle version where there’s a snippet of a review that you want to quote. Then, 45-minutes later you ‘come to’ and realize that you’d been happily exploring the sale items in the Kindle Store and then from there went to Music and DVD’s, finishing up by updating your Wish List!
There are lots of tools and apps out there that offer ‘distraction-free’ reading and other tips and tricks for maintaining focus. But I recently read about a Chrome extension that takes a slightly different tack.
Organize by Relevance
Relevance is the name of this tool, and what it does, in a nutshell, is organize the tabs in your browser so that you can see the places where you’re spending the most time arranged in order from left-to-right. Here’s how they describe what Relevance does:
Relevance is a smart tab organizer. It’s non-intrusive and fully private. When you activate it your tabs are sorted based on the duration you are actively viewing it combined with the total time you actively browse pages on that domain. It will allow you to discover greater insights about your browsing habits.
Relevance will keep track of the pages you actually read, and how long you spend reading them. This information is kept completely private, on your local browser. As you open tabs, its knowledge of what’s important to you grows, and when you activate it the tabs for your current window are ordered depending on how long you have spent reading them.
This creates a natural arrangement where the tabs you have spent the longest on, which are expected to be the most relevant, are placed first, and the ones you haven’t read at all are shunted to the end.
In the time it’s taken me to write this post, for example, my tabs have re-arranged themselves from their usual, static order. My “Add New Post” page, open the longest, is on the far left, and the page for the site describing Relevance is next to it.
If you’re someone who opens lots of tabs while you’re working on-line, this tool will not only organize them for you, but it will also show you where you’re spending your time. This can be invaluable — especially if you feel like you’re not being as productive as you could and are wondering just where your time goes!
Relevance offers you data, not just about where you are spending time, but exactly how much you’re spending. Clicking on the extension, once it’s installed, offers you specific information about how long a tab has been open AND how much time you’ve actually spent on that particular tab.
And every time you click on the extension, it will rearrange your tabs, based on these parameters and any personal settings you’ve added. For example, if there are sites you don’t want to track, you can enter their url’s and Relevance will ignore them.
All in all, I think this is a Chrome extension that has some nice possibilities. Why not check it out? And as always, I’d love to hear what you think!
Disclosure of Material Connection: I have no material connection with the brands, topics, or products that are mentioned here, and have not received any compensation for writing this content.
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