A friend of mine on LJ1 turned me on to a Firefox plugin of epic usefulness – Leechblock. It prevents you from accessing sites that, in your judgement, are timewasters during specified periods of time. It’s not like a nanny software that blocks sites forever, but gives you the option of limiting time on a specific site or banning those sites from being accessed during certain hours. If you’re really worried about self control, you can also choose to set it to prevent you from accessing options until the banned time is over.
Now part of my job really kind of is to screw around on the net. Most of my clients want me to write for the web, so I have to be aware of web trends, understand what makes a good blog post or not, and other things of that nature. Not only that, but I do use the Internet for research.2 However, when you’ve hit refresh for the fiftieth time in an hour on Livejournal, are grinding your teeth at the stupidity Facebook’s latest TOS fiasco, or have posted that you’re clipping your toenails on Twitter, things have gone a bit far.
I consider myself reasonably self-disciplined. I meet deadlines. I finish my to-do list for work. I manage to scrounge enough money to keep me from having to get a “real job” and that really does take some self-motivation. But I’m going to try an experiment. For the next week, I’m going to block some sites from my browser during office hours3 with an hour break for lunch and see what it does to my productivity and client base.
I’m guessin’ we’re gonna see some positive results. Whatcha think?
1 (Thanks sheelangig!)
2You’d be amazed at how inexpensive a single PDF download of an article from a technical or medical journal can be sometimes!
3 6:30-3:30 is usual for me to work.