I’ve been working with it for a few weeks now - almost a month, I think - so I’ve come to a definite conclusion: Leechblock, a firefox extension for FF 3-4, is awesome. If you prefer chrome, there’s a similar extension called Chrome Nanny or something like that. Here’s what they do:
You set up a list of sites that keep you from doing your work. Be honest: add all the sites you use to procrastinate, all the sites that distract you. You can use * for a wildcard: *.tumblr.com will block your dashboard and any individual person’s tumblr. Then, set out a list of times where you want to buckle down and work. I set mine up to block whenever I’m in class, and almost all day on friday, saturday and sunday (the days I have no classes). During that period of time, the sites listed will be blocked, and by default replaced by a screen saying “You can come back when the site is no longer blocked.” You can set it up to redirect to, say, google or something. Or a file on your computer that says “GET BACK TO WORK”.
As far as other features go, it has plenty: you can set up multiple “groups” for blocking, so you can set up different sites to block or different times to block on different days. You can manually enter a “lockdown” mode, which keeps you out of the sites in the group for whatever period of time you specify. You can also set up a timer and have Leechblock kick you off after that time is up: right now, I have Leechblock set up to give me 45 minutes every three hours to screw around on facebook and reading RSS feeds and stuff.
You can set up different options for “how to block” a specific group of sites: it can actively block pages from your sites (when the site is going to be blocked, it will refresh the page and block it), you can prevent access to options for that group when it’s being blocked (sites can be added to groups under the right-click context menu), and in firefox 4 you can prevent access to your addons page so that you can’t get into the leechblock options. You can also set up a timer in the status bar to tell you how long before a site is blocked, and display a popup message x seconds before a site is going to be blocked.
Honestly, after one weekend of having my favourite sites blocked all day, I stopped wanting to play Echo Bazaar. After a couple of weeks, I’ve forgotten what my daily routine used to be - I have to go into the bookmarks menu to remind myself to play BvS and check on tumblr. It’s actually really nice to get up in the morning and spend two hours working, instead of getting up and spending two hours reading RSS feeds. Ideally, I’ll uninstall Leechblock and have that same resolve to get to work. Then, since I’m actually doing work when I have the time, I’ll have more time to relax and talk to people and maybe live a little.