Yesterday, I commented that I’d been told about a blocking add-in for Firefox called Leechblock. You enter the sites you think you shouldn’t visit and when (or for how long). I mentioned that I was going to do an experiment and see what happens.
I’m gonna be honest, I’ve only been doing it for a morning and the results are already embarrassing. I’ve discovered that for a woman in my profession, I permit myself to context switch far, far too often! See, context switching kills concentration, and what does a writer do most of all, boys and girls? Right.
While I didn’t get a whole day’s worth of work done in a quarter of the time, I certainly did get a lot more done than I ordinarily would if I were hanging out on LJ, Tribe, Twitter, and Facebook all day – jumping online between paragraphs. I’ll probably finish up the day a little early, but I’ve got a project that’s been hanging fire for weeks that I’m going to get to, anyway. It’s not paying work, but might turn into paying work, and if I’m gonna set myself strict office hours, I suppose I’m allowed to work on projects when I’m done with my paying work, right?
I have also been using Rescuetime to analyze my computer usage and have discovered that what they call time-wasters are actually often genuine research for me. I’ve also found that I’m spending considerably less time on email than I’d estimated – less than an hour a day. That shocked me, but I realized I won’t have a clear picture until someone starts a heated discussion on PolyFamilies again!