How about just get back to work instead of spending time on this hack? That would save you at least 15 minutes.
Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
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Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#12I use a proxy (Pivoxy) to block requests to distracting sites. not the most effective method, but it works pretty good for me.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#13The best get-back-to-work hack I've ever had is to work on something that interests you. If you're able to do that, you won't need any hacks.
That is disingenuous. In any job/work, even if you love it, there are tasks that blow. Documentation, bug hunting, administrivia, the boilerplate crap that crops up are all examples of this. Some or all of them are required, and since they are not fun, it is easy to get distracted and procrastinate. Some people are just prone to such things. Is it not better that they figure out how to not procrastinate, or that they search for the elusive (possibly mythical) work that has 0% sucky tasks?
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#14My Keep-Working Hack: 2 computers. One for work. One for internet. In different rooms. An egg timer. 48 minutes of work. 12 minutes of break. http://successbeginstoday.org/wordpress/2006/09/the-power-of... http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html
That works for those of us with two computers. I wish there was a way of routinely disabling the Internet, rather than having me manually do it.
I'm pretty sure there's software out there for every OS that will do this.
Alternatively, you can unplug a cable / disable WiFi.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#15How about just get back to work instead of spending time on this hack? That would save you at least 15 minutes.
I think to call this a 'hack' is to devaluate the term.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#16I wrote a shell script that controls and logs your internet usage, hope someone will find it useful.
netctrl script: http://gist.github.com/187318
Basically you set up a cron job (use "netctrl -c") to take your computer online and offline at sometime automatically, and when you want to use internet when you are not supposed to, you have to specify a reason to do so (use "netctrl -u"), and the reason is logged.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#17Even better would be if when you tried to open a web that's a distraction, the browser opened your text editor. I'm kinda dreaming...
It's kind of what Alex's setup is doing by opening Things.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#18So, everytime I take a break and actually don't mind wasting time on reddit, I have to comment out parts of my /etc/hosts ?
You can write a slightly more complicated index.php than he does to time how long it's been since you last checked a distraction, and give you an allowance of, say, one distraction per hour. If you're allowed, the script can just proxy all requests for half a minute.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#19So, everytime I take a break and actually don't mind wasting time on reddit, I have to comment out parts of my /etc/hosts ?
you can have two /etc/hosts (hosts - hosts.restricted), and a script switches each.
implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
That works for those of us with two computers. I wish there was a way of routinely disabling the Internet, rather than having me manually do it.
I'm pretty sure there's software out there for every OS that will do this. Alternatively, you can unplug a cable / disable WiFi.
There is, but I want something automated. I lack self-control.