On Thursday morning I shared a TED Talk given by Dr. Judson Brewer. The talk was about using mindfulness practices to break a bad habit. This morning I came across a Chrome extension that employs that same concept to help people break or curtail the habit of wasting time mindlessly browsing the Internet.

Mindful Internet Use is a Chrome extension that instead of blocking you from viewing time-wasting websites it reminds of the time you’re wasting viewing those websites. You can set Mindful Internet Use to display a motivational quote, a reminder, or a question at preset time intervals. For example, I set it to display the question, “are you doing something meaningful or are you wasting your time?” every fifteen minutes across all of the social media sites on which I have accounts. You can also set the extension to display quotes or questions on every site that you visit.

Applications for Education
Mindful Internet Use could be a great extension for any high school or college student who is prone to wasting time when he or she should be working on a research project or studying. I find that it’s while working on a research task that students are prone to falling into the trap of saying “I’ll just check this social media site for a minute” and before they know it they’ve wasted twenty minutes.