Taming the tempting web

I live on the web.  I work on it, I play on it, I socialize on it.  I am, therefore, subject to great temptation to misuse the web, particularly during work.  Random browsing and long chains of link-following are very detrimental to productivity, and controlling the impulse that begins such acts is very, very difficult.

Today I finally found a tool that somehow has managed to escape my notice for years: LeechBlock.  This tool lets you add your distracting sites to named buckets, each of which you can give a certain number of access rules.  For instance, I have two buckets – Time Wasters and Semi-Time Wasters:

Time Wasters

I identified these as the sites I’d start browse to just by habit, almost out of sheer motor memory.  An instant distraction is all it would take for my mouse to automatically open a browser and start typing one of these addresses:

  • http://reddit.com
  • http://arstechnica.com
  • http://newegg.com (why is assembling and configuring systems you’re not going to buy fun??)

I set these up so that I can only get them for five minutes an hour during normal business hours, 7 days a week

Semi-Time Wasters

These are sites that I visit somewhat less regularly, or are useful enough in a business sense that I don’t want to completely remove my ability to read them:

  • http://news.ycombinator.com
  • http://nytimes.com

I allow myself 10 minutes per hour on these.

My previous approach to this problem had been to de-route my obsessive sites in windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts (by pointing them at localhost).  This kept them completely out of my reach, but I was loathe to move the less distracting sites into the scheme as I do get quite a bit of good, marketable information from them.  That meant it was just pure willpower that kept me from reading pages and pages of good content while I should be crushing small, elusive, annoying bugs.  Needless to say, it didn’t always work out well.

The impressive result to he self-denial process is how quickly the motor memory fades.  A few disrupted attempts at redditing is all it takes to make the urge go away.  It’s like the invisible gremlin in my head that was keeping me from working gave up and went home.