Taking life philosophically.
22 February 2010
It is a rare experience for me to find a piece of software that becomes something you end up using every day. My recent favorite is LeechBlock, an extension for Firefox. The idea is quite simple. LeechBlock stops you from wasting your time on useless websites. You get to specify the sites and the limits, and the options are quite sophisticated.
It is not that the web is not useful, or that it should only be used for serious, productive work. I spend some time daily reading the news and commentary, and I am quite happy about that. Years ago I used to spend a lot of time on web forums, which can be a very useful experience or a complete waste of time, depending on the other users. Personally I feel I have learned a lot discussing different ideas on the forums.
I mainly use LeechBlock for two kinds of sites, news sites and social sites. I have never used social sites too much, but it is useful to set a cap on how much time to spend on them in one day. I only use them five minutes a day. For the news sites I have set myself a limit of 20 minutes per day, which is enough to get the day’s news, while not being enough to start procrastinating. Finally, I only allow myself to monitor my stocks for five minutes every three hours, which again is enough to know how things stand, while not being enough to start clicking the refresh button.
Even if you do not feel like having a bit of software deciding on what you can do on your computer, it is also possible to use LeechBlock just to collect statistics on how much time you spend on specific sites or groups of sites. This allows you to see, for example, how many minutes on average you spend each day on Facebook and Twitter. After you see the data, it is then up to you whether you are comfortable with using your time like that.
The journal of Timo Laine (contact information). Cultural commentary from the perspective of a philosophy student in Helsinki.