As someone who grew up with the Internet, I’ve become a little addicted to it. This is okay to an extent, but I’ve decided recently that I can be a better person by spending less time online and more time unplugged.
To enforce this attitude and increase my productivity (at least while I’m at work) I’m using a the StayFocusd Chrome extension to limit my access to the sites that are sapping my motivation most often.
In a nutshell, I’ve given myself ten minutes between the sites on the “blocked” list, which has to last me from 8am to 5pm. I had a few tabs open from one of my favorite sites right when I hit the ten minute mark.
When you hit the daily limit, all sites on the blocked list blank themselves and display a message saying, “Shouldn’t you be working?” Desperately, I flipped to the next tab. I managed a brief glimpse of the forbidden fruit of interesting but distracting web content before StayFocusd reminded me to get back to work. I did this again a third and fourth time, each tab teasing me with something and snatching it away. It felt like the scenes in Inception where the dreams collapse and the characters watch as the destruction rushes towards them.
Now, with a few hours left in the work week and my time on frivolous websites exhausted until quitting time, I return to productivity. Right after I write this blog post.