I have written before for my love of focus-boosting tools like Leechblock and RescueTime, but I’ve been using a new one that I like, and thought I’d share: MORPHINE. When I switched to Chrome a while back, I was bummed to find that my beloved Leechblock was only available on Firefox. (Firefox kept crashing, everyone said Chrome was faster, and I know most of you view the site in Chrome, so I wanted to switch over to make sure the experience was the same.)
I looked around and found this great little plugin, Morphine, which I now use all the time, primarily for Facebook (SUCH a distractor for me!). The idea is that you only “earn” time with the URLs you put in Morphine after you’ve been using the computer for more productive purposes for a certain amount of time. Perfect. I used to have it set to 1 minute of play time for every 10 minutes of work time, but that left me with far too many minutes in my bank — so I switched it to 1 minute of play time for every 60 minutes of work time. That was a bit too little (I’ve decided I need at least 3 minutes to look at Facebook, even using the Social Fixer plugin, because when I try to sneak a peek for one minute, and inevitably try to refresh it for another minute more, it would take me at least 30 seconds to find my place scrolling down the page. (Lazy load, you kill me!)
Ladies, what are your other favorite productivity products, especially for blocking internet distractions? (Any favorite Chrome plugins to shout out?)
Anonymous
I’d love to hear if there is anything that works at work. Internet explorer, government, would rather not tell IT that I need it but I might be getting there.
Becca
I’m obsessed with StayFocusd. It has a ‘nuclear’ option that will block any sites that you put on a list and instead show a ‘shouldn’t you be working?’ page if you try and load it. You can set it for as much or as little time as you want. I used it all throughout school and found my productivity increased dramatically!
My favorite thing is that you could also block parts of websites – so say you’re using the New York Times international section for legitimate work, but don’t want to be tempted to wander over to the Style section, you can set it so only certains parts of the website are allowed through.
Cb
I love StayFocused, helps me cut out all the distractions when I’m trying to write.
Ellen
We have a low-teck solution to the Internet. The manageing partner had our teck guy block the INTERNET for all sights that he does NOT personaly approve. I got VERY mad b/c I work VERY long hours here and at home, useing my wireless rooter, but thru the work server, so I got the manageing partner to approve about 30 sights that I use, INCLUDING CORPORETE (YAY!). That way, I do NOT get blocked, but Frank can NOT get these sights from his computer.
I also use my ipad from home and my macbook Air and iphone so my Apple product’s ARE NOT effected. YAY!!
Anon
Also a huge huge fan of StayFocused. When I was having one of those “just can’t get focused” days, I would hit the nuclear option, and then could only look at the work-related sites that I had entered.
*One tip: For other Westlaw / Lexis users, when you put in your “okay” sites, make sure to use the asterisks, so that you won’t be blocked from the sign-on pages. I had that problem a few times before I figured it out. (Meaning, I had put the main WL/Lx pages in the “okay” list, but then the app would prevent me from using those programs because the sign-on pages, which have a slightly varied web address, weren’t on there.)
Now I have to use Firefox and I’m still figuring out how to use this browser. I miss Chrome!
TBK
I just tried to set StayFocused but I can’t tell the difference between it running regularly and nuclear option. If I want to give myself a total of X min per day on “fun” websites (um, like this one), and then have it block me from those specific websites after the time is up, what setting do I use?
mascot
Regular. I think nuclear can be used to block the whole web or start blocking even if time is still available.
Moonstone
Kat — I give you a lot of credit for facilitating a discussion among your readers on how to keep yourself from reading blogs at work. Seriously.
Sheepla
+1