Improve Your Productivity in One Step – Go Offline!
January 10, 2008 8:45 am College, Learning, Procrastination, ProductivityThe internet is truly a wonderland. Thousands of news stories, blogs, games, videos, social networking sites, all lie tantalizingly beneath your fingertips, just waiting to be explored.
Don’t surf the internet on study time.
Some buildings on my campus don’t have wireless. I remember being stuck inside the Political Science department once in a rainstorm. My class was still hours away, but I decided to hole up in an unused classroom with my laptop rather than brave the heavy rain.
At first, I didn’t have anything to do. My routine is to check my gmail, then read some news, then check my gmail again, then my RSS Reader, then more gmail. After that, I do some work, and check gmail again. (Does this sound familiar?)
With no internet, I couldn’t check my gmail, and the whole process was stopped before it started. Then, a miracle happened. Wanting desperately to avoid boredom, I started working on the first thing I could find — and finished, rather quickly. Then I found something else, finished it, and moved onto a third task. By the time class started, I had finished three rather unpleasant tasks that I had been putting off for weeks.
Since that incident, I’ve taken myself off the internet on a number of occasions, and it has resulted in productivity gains every single time. One of the secrets to being productive is to schedule uninterruptible periods. Even if you are working diligently most of the time, the thirty second break to check email or facebook can set you back as many as five or six minutes when you consider the time spent getting re-focused.
“Very well,” you may be saying to yourself, “but what if I need the internet for my work? Is there any way I can have the best of both worlds?”
It turns out that there is. Invisibility Cloak is a Greasemonkey script written by Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani. It allows you to create a blacklist of sites and specify a time period during which they will be blocked. For instance, you can block *.facebook.com and youtube.com between 12:00 AM and 8:00 PM, which means that your browser will prevent you from accessing that page except for four hours at night.
You can configure the script in Firefox by going to Tools => Greasemonkey => Manage User Scripts, and selecting Invisibility Cloak from the menu on the left.In order to change the period, you will need to edit the Javascript file with an editor (Notepad works just fine). Just click the Edit button in the lower left hand corner on the pop-up window and it will open the associated Javascript file. Find the following four lines:
// EDIT THE NEXT LINE TO SET THE HOUR AFTER WHICH SITES SHOULD APPEAR
// HOURS IN MILITARY TIME, SO 15 = 3PM
var surf_time_after = 15;
// END EDIT
Edit the value of surf_time_after as per the instructions, save, and go back to Firefox. If you want, you can also change the message that appears when you try to access a blocked site. I changed it to something rather derogatory. Here’s the line you need to alter. Just change the text inside the parenthesis (keep the quotation marks).
alert(”You can surf after “+ readable_time + “; right now, get back to work!”);
Do give this script a spin – it works remarkably well, even though there is a very simple way to disable it (if enough people want to know how to do this, I will post an answer in the comments). Also, if you have anything to add on the subject of going offline to increase productivity, please feel free to comment for the benefit of other readers. I’m also an avid comment reader, so I look forward to it as well.
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January 19th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
[...] Improve Your Productivity in One Step — Go Offline | The Student Help Forum A simply observation, but one that should be hammered into student’s heads again and again. Don’t go online while trying to work! Here, Saad Padela makes a good pitch for the idea. [...]
January 20th, 2008 at 1:08 am
I really like the idea of blocking such work-inhibiting web sites. However, when I installed the extension and edited the time restraints, it did not work for me. How do I fix this?
January 21st, 2008 at 2:25 am
S. Nuti,
Can you tell me a little more about what’s going on? Is the script not working at all, or is it blocking only some (but not all) of the sites you want it to block?
January 29th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
I can’t get it to change the time. What are you writing in your notepad document in order to do this?
February 3rd, 2008 at 1:58 am
nikki,
I am no longer blogging for Student Help Forum. (I’m not really sure who is.)
I’m going to throw out a wild guess as to what might be giving you trouble. You can’t really change the time window to exactly what you want. It’s limited to 12 am midnight AND SOMETHING. You can define the something, but you can’t move it off midnight. (You can, but you’d need to make some adjustments to the code itself.) That might be why you’re getting unexpected performance.