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. 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.
Boy, 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. 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. 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.
And so it goes: You get to your PC every morning with hours of productive time ahead of you. Next thing you know, it’s 5 p.m. and you’ve frittered the day away on Digg, Hulu, Wikipedia and your fantasy football league. 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.
During the last few weeks, I've been using a slate of programs to tame these digital distractions. The apps break down into three broad categories. The most innocuous simply try to monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. Others reduce visual bells and whistles on my desktop as a way to keep me focused.
And then there are the apps that really mean business - they let me actively block various parts of the Internet so that when my mind strays, I'm prohibited from giving in to my shiftless ways. It’s the digital equivalent of dieting by locking up the refrigerator and throwing away the key.
The first category is epitomized by a program called RescueTime, which keeps track of everything that happens on your computer, and then reports your habits in a series of charts and graphs. I found the software's analysis tremendously illuminating. I learned, for instance, that during a typical month I spend more than 70 hours surfing the Web, much of it on news and social-networking sites.
By comparison, I spend only about half as much time in Microsoft Word, which, as a writer, is where I do my work. Seeing these stats knocked me over; clearly, I wasn’t using my time very wisely. (RescueTime offers a free limited version; an upgraded plan with deeper usage stats costs $8 a month.)
So what to do? Over the years, several friends have suggested that I might stay more focused by ditching Word in favor of a so-called minimalist writing tool. These programs, like Hog Bay Software’s WriteRoom for the Mac ($24.95) or the free Dark Room for Windows, essentially take your computer back two decades in time. Each presents you with a full-screen, monochrome window absent of taskbars and menus; the experience is that of typing on an old-fashioned dedicated word processor, with every other function of a modern PC hidden from view.
But the procrastinator's mind is not so quickly deceived. I found that I could easily switch from working in Dark Room to wasting time in a Web browser — and that was a problem.
Time for stronger medicine: I loaded up LeechBlock, a free add-on for Firefox whose main function is to save you from yourself. 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. Try to go to Facebook and you get back a warning to go back to work.
The software is quite flexible. 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. 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. This gave me a little bit of time to goof off, but not enough that I’d lose sight of my larger purpose.
But LeechBlock suffers a crucial limitation: if you really want to get around it, all you have to do is load up another browser. 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. 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.
I wish I could say that using these digital nannies has revolutionized the way I work. They didn’t, really. Though blocking time-sucking Web sites did keep me from goofing off on my computer, I found that my brain quickly compensated by wasting time in other ways: As I’m writing this paragraph, for example, I’m also eating a peach. But not just eating it without thinking — I’ve been using a paring knife to try to cut perfectly cubical pieces to pop into my mouth.
Perhaps this kind of unconscious fidgeting — whether online or off — is inevitable. The mind is a restless place, and creative pursuits like writing seem unsustainable in long bursts; perhaps the mind just needs frequent breaks.
But I did notice that net-blocking software was helpful in getting me to at least consider all the ways that I was wasting my time. When LeechBlock threw up a roadblock in my path, it gave me pause; when I went around it, I was at least conscious that it wasn’t the right thing to do. Sometimes a little shame is all you need.
From: the NYTimes
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