Leechblock: My Online Babysitter

Last night I added a new tool to my repertoire to prevent me from wasting time on certain websites during the day when I should be working. It's called LeechBlock and it's a Firefox extension that prevents you from visiting websites you've specified during different times of day (or more than x minutes out of the hour).

Although there are safeguards you can enable to prevent yourself from circumventing LeechBlock through its options, I choose not to make it too difficult for myself to go to those websites should I find myself hell-bent on visiting them. I use it as more of a reminder to myself that I should be working and not Plurking. To become too reliant on something like this (by disabling the ability to turn off LeechBlock) would prevent you from having any sort of self-control when it comes to your internet browsing. Besides, you never know when you'll have work-related things to do on social networking sites.

Currently I have the following settings enabled:

• For the following sites
  • www.plurk.com
  • www.myspace.com
  • www.facebook.com
• Block between 3PM and 10PM AND
• If visited for more than 30 minutes out of the hour
• For Monday through Friday

So basically I can't visit my favorite social networking sites (not that I even visit MySpace anymore) during the weekdays between 3PM and 10PM. If I do visit them during the weekdays outside of those times, it has to be less than 30 minutes out of the hour.

Well I better get back to work, or else I may have to add Blogger to that list!