![]() ![]() I wish I could say that using these digital nannies has revolutionized the way I work. In other words, once you set it, you’ve got no Web, no instant messaging, no e-mail and the only way to undo Freedom’s block before the time runs out is to restart your machine. One Mac app that has found a way to solve this problem is called Freedom, which blocks all of your computer’s networking functions for a pre-determined number of minutes. ![]() This gave me a little bit of time to goof off, but not enough that I’d lose sight of my larger purpose.īut LeechBlock suffers a crucial limitation: if you really want to get around it, all you have to do is load up another browser. For instance, I asked LeechBlock to restrict my time on Twitter and Facebook to no more than five minutes an hour, and on news sites to no more than 10 minutes an hour. You can let it block out different sites at different times of the day, or set a maximum daily or hourly limit for certain sites. Try to go to Facebook and you get back a warning to go back to work. LeechBlock works like a stern nanny: You tell it which Web sites to keep you away from, and at the appointed hour, it stops you cold. Time for stronger medicine: I loaded up LeechBlock, a free add-on for Firefox whose main function is to save you from yourself. I found that I could easily switch from working in Dark Room to wasting time in a Web browser and that was a problem. Others reduce visual bells and whistles on my desktop as a way to keep me focused.īut the procrastinator’s mind is not so quickly deceived. The most innocuous simply try to monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. The apps break down into three broad categories. And no wonder how can anyone expect to get anything done when you’re plying your trade on one of the most distracting machines ever invented? With so much available on your PC your friends, blogs, games and even TV shows working in a modern office can often seem as rattling as working on the floor of a Las Vegas casino.ĭuring the last few weeks, I’ve been using a slate of programs to tame these digital distractions. and you’ve frittered the day away on Digg, Hulu, Wikipedia and your fantasy football league. And did you hear what that ignorant congressman just said about health care? Now you’ve got no choice but to spend the next five minutes crafting an impassioned tweet to express your outrage.Īnd so it goes: You get to your PC every morning with hours of productive time ahead of you. ![]() But hey, look at this someone wants to be your friend on Facebook! And wait a second: A zany couple decided to start off their wedding by dancing down the aisle, and lucky for everyone, they posted the video on YouTube. We were told they would perform amazing feats of office derring-do adding up rows of numbers effortlessly, turning our musings into beautiful magazine-quality documents, and letting us collaborate with one another across continents.īoy, that turned out well, didn’t it? Sure, you could use your PC to analyze stats for the annual sales report due in two days. Is there any human invention more duplicitous than the personal computer? These machines were manufactured and initially marketed as devices to help us at work.
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