Spending hours or minutes working out yet another restriction on distractions instead of learning how to focus and concentrate properly? What good can this possibly ever do.
Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#32So, 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.
Or you can just install rescue time. I think this is a new feature now.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#33My 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.
If you're on a Mac, check out Freedom: http://macfreedom.com/
It does exactly what you want. I think I first heard about it on a HN thread a while ago...
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#34Earlier 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.
If you're on a Mac, check out Freedom: http://macfreedom.com/ It does exactly what you want. I think I first heard about it on a HN thread a while ago...
Problem with Freedom is I have to manually activate it. I never do.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#35My 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.
rescuetime does this.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#36I drag the favicon of my current project to the home button (to set it as my home page). Everytime I open a new browser window I am reminded of what I should really be doing.
When that task is finished, I change the home page to the next task.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#37I use rescue time. It is amazing. Having fun to do work also helps. Well that is it for this comment, I need to get back to work.
I wish it would work with Snow Leopard. Crashes on startup for me (even the special Snow Leopard version they posted).
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#38My 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
What? Do you really do this? It would drive me insane. Every 48 minutes you're interrupted by an alarm forcing you to stop what you're doing, get up, lose your train of thought, and then start over again? Also, you can't reliably separate the work computer from the internet one if you want to search the web for help/resources. How do you manage that?
From your own web site, http://30dayflight.com/ ...
It is impossible for me to achieve the minimum level of awesomeness that I require of articles before I publish them within just a few hours in a single day, so I'm going to switch to a 3- or 5-day publishing timespan. This will hopefully keep me from going totally insane.
For someone who so goes "insane" and finds things "impossible" so easily, perhaps you should open your mind to the success strategies of others before you criticize them so hastily. Looks like you need to be doing something differently if your 30 day website is already 4 days behind on Day 7.
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#39I 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.
This is exactly what I would love to use, sadly won't work with Vista :(
Re: Alex Payne — My Get-Back-To-Work Hack
#40My 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
What? Do you really do this? It would drive me insane. Every 48 minutes you're interrupted by an alarm forcing you to stop what you're doing, get up, lose your train of thought, and then start over again? Also, you can't reliably separate the work computer from the internet one if you want to search the web for help/resources. How do you manage that?
I do something similar usually stopping around 45 minutes. I've gone to this method over a couple years of trial and error and it seems to be ideal for me. I have also come across studies which show that people can only focus on something for about 40-50 minutes before losing interest. So a short break is needed after that time period to refresh.
Also I have noticed that I tend to accomplish something worthy (eg. fixing a bug, implementing a small feature) at around the 45 minute point so it is good for motivation as I can take a break knowing I have accomplished something.