Page Activity

Since 8:38 PM on February 22nd, I’ve been recording all my browsing activity in a database I manage using a custom-built browser extension and a wrapper around @rosskevin/ifvisible. The result? I now have a clear picture of just how much time I’ve spent on the web this past month. And, well… I spend a lot of time reading email. Go figure.

Here are the top 12 domains I visited, ranked by active time spent on them:

Looking over this list, I’m surprised at how different my actual internet usage is from how I thought I used the internet. Gmail, LinkedIn, and Feedbin all make sense near the top (though I’m surprised LinkedIn is so high), but I didn’t expect GitHub, ChatGPT, and Google Docs to take up as much time as they did. I’ve always considered myself someone who spends a lot of time reading Wikipedia and Newcastle news (www.themag.co.uk), but in reality, I was almost as active in Google Docs as I was on Wikipedia. Making this point is totally why I included 12 domains rather than, say, 5.

A Side Note

This ties into a theme I’ve been thinking about lately. In short, I’ve been pondering if we identify more with who we think we are than with who we actually are. The idea came up while reading Every Good Endeavor. In it, Tim Keller notes that many people take jobs based on what’s considered cool or successful, only to find them draining because the work itself isn’t fulfilling. I tend to agree with his point. Picking a career is a weird thing. I also think the idea applies beyond career choices. It’s here in the disconnect the version of me in my head as someone who spends lots of time reading Wikipedia when, in reality, I spend nearly as much time playing with spreadsheets in Google Docs. Yes, that doesn’t mean I don’t read a good amount of Wikipedia, but, clearly, I do a lot more than that with my web browser.

Feedbin

I wish I had started tracking my browsing a little earlier—I’d love to see how adding Feedbin changed my internet habits. I also really wish Feedbin used distinct URIs for each feed item as I read it! Right now, my tracking shows that I spent 4 hours and 22 minutes on Feedbin’s homepage since I signed up on February 28th, just aimlessly clicking around. My total time on the domain was 4 hours and 28 minutes, which means almost all of it was spent at /. What gives?!

This is now on my growing list of things I wish Feedbin did. Ideally, it wouldn’t even need to be a unique-to-me URL—just something I could share so that another Feedbin user (most likely future me) could open the same article. Future me would love that.

A Few Closing Notes

  1. I’m not calling this data “Activity” because I’m not entirely sure how well my hacked-together browser tracker handles reading sessions. It’s possible that long-form content appears as a bunch of short sessions. In aggregate (since every time I scroll, a new session starts), it should be fairly accurate. But less interactive pages will likely have some lost time.
  2. I had string of days recently without opening Feedbin. I’m curious if I can group the data by day and categorize my browsing patterns, detecting ebbs and flows in usage like this. What did I do instead? Maybe I read a book.
  3. Most of my local-files time (2 hours, 41 minutes) was spent working on (or playing with) Web Graph Browser. It’s a kind of dumb, kind of fun, totally hacked-together tool that lets you “browse” the “web” by clicking nodes in a graph (links) to see how pages connect.
  4. All this data is for just my personal laptop. It would be so interesting to have this for my phone too, but mobile browsers hate extensions. It would also be so interesting to have this for my work as well, but... well... I suspect explaining that extension would be interesting if IT ever reviewed me, so we won’t get that data.