Sometimes it’s good to bring a little extra nag into your life.

Your spirit may be willing, but in practice there are lots of either irritating or unpleasant tasks that you should be doing that it might be simpler to just forget about.

One of those categories for a lot of people are a lot of things concerning becoming or regularly maintaining your level of environmental-friendliness.

Yes, we all know what is or isn’t good for the environment… but knowing and doing are two very different things. It seems so many of the things we’re expected to do now to save the planet goes completely against often decades (or generations) of family habi – it can all get a bit tiring trying to keep up with all the little things we’re supposed to be doing that some do-gooder will lay a guilt trip on us about later on if we don’t.

That’s why I love it when I see a cool little gadget like the Waterpebble.

Especially as Australians, becoming a little conservative with water is not only a good idea, but no doubt will become essential as the years roll on. But even if you’re rolling with the James Bond Shower (… still the greatest Sydnerati obsession of 2010) it’s still a tricky thing to know exactly when to turn your shower off, or to snap out of that delicious vacant-staring reverie under a gentle hot stream of water and decide it’s time to switch off.

Waterpebble not only takes out all the guess work, it gradually starts nagging you into shorter showers each day, turning you into a habitual water-saving machine.

How it works is that it just sits in the bottom of your shower like a little plastic rock, and just chills there. Don’t need to switch it on, don’t need to worry about it. It’s happy just hanging out, waiting to nag.

The first time you throw it in the shower with you, it soaks up the water around it, and records how long your shower is. From there, each time you get in the shower, it’ll flash up an amber then a red light once you’ve reached that point in time, letting you know it’s time to go.

To make matters worse (or better, depending on whether you’re a shower-half-full kinda person) it starts gradually shaving a fraction of time off your showers each day, pulling you back from the soul-killing guilt of being a water-waster, turning you eventually into some kind of new-age water-wise superhero.

(My question to the clever inventors would be if you kept this going forever, would the Waterpebble eventually nag you into a 5-second shower? Would the robot know when to stop, or would the little cyber-nagger just keep pushing on like the bath-time equivalent of the Terminator, not stopping until its earthly mission was done…)

All in all, it’s a very clever outside-the-box idea, and one which feels like it wouldn’t be that much hard work to incorporate into your daily routine. (Meaning, it’s a lot easier to do than say, having to not use the garbage chute for your recyclables but instead have to walk down two storeys to your buildings garbage room separately with all your paper and plastics… so tempting to just be bad in that case…)

These little suckers are cheap, and once they die (apparently after 6 months) they’re completely recyclable.

Make sure you check out the video on the website if you want to see them in action (oh yeah baby… a plastic rock, just sitting there, getting all wet…. ), and in no time you’ll be nagged into water-wise submission…