January 6th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I am a procrastinator at heart. I dawdle, dilly-dally and drag my feet if it means that I can put off until tomorrow what I really should be getting done today—doing my writing/housework/errands. So, this past week, in the interests of protecting me (or, more importantly, my time) from myself, I’ve taken the step of blocking myself from a few of my favourite time-wasting websites (notably Facebook, Livejournal and few torrent sites) between 8:00am and 8:00pm daily.

I know fully half the day seems like a drastic measure, but there were a few solid reasons I chose those hours:

1) It’s the time Carla’s usually at work (on the days she’s working), so it’s the time best served by being productive.
2) If I want to see what happened during the night on any of my blocked sites, I have to get up before 8am (or wait until evening again). This is an incentive for me not to sleep in (or at least a trade-off if I want to).
3) There’s generally nothing on Facebook that can’t wait until after 8pm for me to see it.

Having chosen the time I wanted to set aside and I sites I wanted to block, I installed the Leechblock add-on for Firefox and was amazed by how simple its setup was. Under the preferences, you tell it which sites you want blocked and it will either block them between two set points on the days you specify (like I have—8:00 to 8:00, 7 days a week) or block them after a certain amount of surfing within a time frame (i.e. 10 minutes per hour, an hour per day, etc.). On top of that, if you don’t trust yourself not to go in and turn it off, you can lock yourself out of the preferences while it’s running. I don’t trust myself; I’m fond of this option.

I know the internet’s just one of dozens of distractions that conspire to keep me from knuckling down on a daily basis, but I figure if one free add-on can keep my daytime hours clear of the most omnipresent and invasive distraction in my life, that’s good enough for me. More time to deal with stuff that matters. And I promise I’ll read all your status updates later tonight.