unintuitive

Digg, how I loathe thee.  Reddit?  I fear I may puke.  And Hacker News makes me feel nauseated.  I hate these sites.

But I can’t stop visiting them.

Sometimes web surfing goes beyond a mere diversion and ventures into full-blown vice territory.  I know, I’m there now.  And I’m willing to wager the ‘net surfing habit probably has affected someone you know, too (nudge, nudge).

Habitual surfing of websites is responsible for businesses losing upwards of $200 billion in revenue every year in the United States alone.  Okay, I just made that statistic up, but I’m sure it’s a lot.  I know for a fact that I can easily sink a few hours every day randomly surfing the web, looking for something interesting.

The Big Payoff

And you know what?  I never find anything interesting.  At all.  It’s just one big waste of time, full of Obamadrama, stupid pictures, random stories about various people being idiots, and yet another half-assed Cracked.com top-10 list.

I still do it anyway.

So how do you break an internet addiction when you earn a fraction or your entire income from online sources?  You can’t just turn the computer off, can you?  I know doing so would kill me, and probably you too, so we won’t even explore that option.

Step 1 - Install RescueTime

RescueTime is an easy-to-use program that will automatically track what you’re doing on your computer - both online and off - and put it all in graph form.  Now you can finally quantify exactly how many hours of your life have been washed down the drain every week watching unfunny CollegeHumor videos.

Step 2 - Install LeechBlock

LeechBlock is a Firefox add-on that you can set to block access to a site.  You can either set up the plugin to block the offending sites completely, or just during a certain time period - like when you have to work.  But what’s to stop you from disabling the plugin?   Well, LeechBlock itself will stop you.  The plugin features password protection on the options panel.  Just pop in a randomly-generated password, and you’ll never gain access to those blocked sites again.  (Well, there are ways, but you have to jump through hoops).

Are you still using Internet Explorer?  Why?  Though I fear for your very soul, you can still block sites using IE7’s built-in Content Advisor feature.  It’s not as flexible as the LeechBlock solution, but it’ll do.  Alternatively, you can head to the K9 Web Protection site and marvel at how gigantic that child’s head is.  Seriously, that must have been the most painful birth ever.  Oh, they also offer website filtering software, or something.

In Conclusion

Stop wasting time.