The internet is truly a wonderland. Thousands of
news stories, blogs, games, videos, social networking sites, all
lie tantalizingly beneath your fingertips, just waiting to be
explored. I know some of you can't live without SgForums or the
Homework Forum but it has proven time and time again. I've
experienced multiple productive surges when I take myself off the
internet.
Don’t surf the internet on study time.
Some buildings in my school don’t have wireless. I remember
being stuck inside my school once in a rainstorm after school. So I
decided to hole up in an unused classroom with my laptop rather
than brave the heavy rain. (I brought the laptop for
presentation.)
At first, I didn’t have anything to do. My routine is to check
my mail, then read some news, then check my mail again, then my RSS
Reader, then more mail. After that, I do some work, and check mail
again. (Does this sound familiar?)
With no internet, I couldn’t check my mail, and the whole
process was stopped before it started. Then, a miracle happened.
Wanting desperately to avoid boredom, I started working on the
first thing I could find — and finished, rather quickly. Then I
found something else, finished it, and moved onto a third task. By
the time the rain subsided, I had finished three rather unpleasant
tasks that I had been putting off for weeks.
Since that incident, I’ve taken myself off the
internet on a number of occasions, and it has resulted in
productivity gains every single time. One of the secrets to
being productive is to schedule uninterruptible periods.
Even if you are working diligently most of the time, the
thirty second break to check email or facebook can set you back as
many as five or six minutes when you consider the time spent
getting re-focused.
“Very well,” you may be saying to yourself, “but what if I
need the internet for my work? Is there any way I can have
the best of both worlds?”
It turns out that there is. Invisibility Cloak is
a Greasemonkey script written by
Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani. It allows you to
create a blacklist of sites and specify a time period during which
they will be blocked. For instance, you can block *.facebook.com
and youtube.com between 12:00 AM and 8:00 PM, which means that your
browser will prevent you from accessing that page except for four
hours at night.
You can configure the script in Firefox by going to Tools =>
Greasemonkey => Manage User Scripts, and selecting Invisibility
Cloak from the menu on the left.In order to change the period, you
will need to edit the Javascript file with an editor (Notepad works
just fine). Just click the Edit button in the lower left hand
corner on the pop-up window and it will open the associated
Javascript file. Find the following four lines:
// EDIT THE NEXT LINE TO SET THE
HOUR AFTER WHICH SITES SHOULD APPEAR
// HOURS IN MILITARY TIME, SO 15 = 3PM
var surf_time_after = 15;
// END EDIT
Edit the value of surf_time_after as per the instructions, save,
and go back to Firefox. If you want, you can also change the
message that appears when you try to access a blocked site. I
changed it to something rather derogatory. Here’s the line you need
to alter. Just change the text inside the parenthesis (keep the
quotation marks).
alert(”You can surf after “+
readable_time + “; right now, get back to work!”);
Do give this script a spin - it works remarkably well, even
though there is a very simple way to disable it (if enough people
want to know how to do this, I will post an answer in the
comments). Also, if you have anything to add on the subject of
going offline to increase productivity, please feel free to comment
for the benefit of other readers. I’m also an avid comment reader,
so I look forward to it as well, although not often.
Since I do not frequent SgForums as much, I can be reached on both
MSN and Email at the following address:
AlsonKaw [at] PixelRebels.uni.cc
