This morning I installed Leechblock, an anti-distraction, anti-procrastination site blocker add-on for my web browser. So far, I really like it, even though I lost edits to this post TWICE because I couldn’t stick to the time limits I set for myself and got blocked before I saved my edits. Totally my fault, because I turned on the menu item in the browser that tells me exactly how much time I have left on a site and I knew I was letting myself get too close to the limits each time it happened. :o
I set up some fairly complex blocks and delays, and I’ve spent a lot more time on it than I’d planned. I’m a little unsure if it’s going to turn out to be worth the time I’ve spent, but I’m hopeful. Unfortunately, there are still some tweaks to be made, but I think I’ve mostly got it how I want it.
[removed for edits and pasted below with changes]
Well, that’s it. I gotta go or I’m going to find myself blocked! :D.
Update
That lasted about 30 minutes. And it’s obvious I’m going to be doing most of my work outside my ideal time span, so the time blocks I set up aren’t going to work to help me at all.
Time to do a little rethinking on this. I’ll update when I settle on something.
All right. I’ve made some tweaks.
I’ve set up 5 block sets.
- Distractions – blocked outright from 0700-1400 (7am to 2pm), with a 20 minute limit for the rest of the day
- Sales reports – blocked after 15 minutes between 0700-1400 (7am to 2pm) – on publishing days, I’ll deactivate the add-on because I’ll need unfettered internet access, and there’s no easy way to account for that
- Internet limits – limited everything except weather.gov and Google calendar between 0700-1400 (7am to 2pm) to 60 minutes total – if I’m spending that long browsing websites, I’m probably just procrastinating, which can wait until after 2pm :)
- Strict limits blocked outright from 0700-1400 (7am to 2pm), with a 10 minute limit for the rest of the day
- Blogging – blocked after 30 minutes between 0700-1400 (7am to 2pm) – this is me trying to make Parkinson’s Law work in my favor – I don’t want to cut off my blogging on days when I need the accountability, but I also don’t want to spend too much of my writing time updating a blog post
What this comes to each day is that in total I’ll spend no more than 60 minutes of my day between 7am and 2pm doing things in my browser. There’s still email, since I don’t use my browser to check, but I really am hoping this will cut down on how much time I spend online distracting myself from writing. :)
It’s a bit late now and I want to get up before noon tomorrow, so I’m going to go. But I’m excited to see how this works tomorrow. First goal: not to override the add-on and see how it works. It’ll be a fun experiment!
Oh, and yeah, I can totally get online with my phone or a tablet, but I believe there’s still benefit to this: I can try to break some bad habits; morning time is my best writing time and I’ve been spending lots of it jumping around online on the computer.