I am not an engineer or scientist, nor do I have special interest in nuclear physics, yet I spent six hours straight reading about nuclear physics on Wikipedia yesterday. The content about those sub-atomic particles was so addictive and fascinating, that I lost the count of time and let many hours slip easily from my regular workday. It was only when I received a phone call from my friend Tina, I cam to know about the time I had wasted reading about something that does not really concern me or my work. I am sure you all have had similar experiences in your life when you just waste the entire day watching videos or communicating with others on social networking sites.
Although we should do more of what makes us happy, but if it interferes with your work, then you have to take some measures to prevent so much time wasting on these highly addictive sites. The LeechBlock extension for Firefox and Chrome helps you exactly that. It can block all those addictive sites in the time duration specified by you. After installing the extension you can right-click anywhere and choose LeechBlock → Options from the context menu.
In the options for LeechBlock, you will find many block sets that you can configure to block various sets of websites. Take any block set, give it a name and add all the sites that you want to block – one domain per line and then click Next.
In the next screen, you will have to specify the time period in which you want to block these sites – time duration in the day and which days of the week. There is also an option to allow you block the set of sites for a specific number of minutes every so often.
Clicking on the Next button will bring you to the screen where you can specify a blocking web page that would be shown when a website gets blocked. LeechBlock comes with a default blocking web page of its own, but you can specify any local or online web page for this purpose. Finally click OK to save the settings.
After this, you can right click on any web page and choose LeechBlock → Lockdown to start the lock down of sites. It will ask you the time duration for which you want to lock down and to choose a block set.
Now if you try to access any of the web sites that you have added to the block sets, you will see the block page instead. The block page shall keep appearing for as long as the lock down is in place.
Conclusion: LeechBlock is a simple way to keep yourself away from distracting websites that could consume hours of your day time that you should have been spending doing some productive work. It exercises a self imposed block on the sites that you most frequent so as to keep you away from them.
You can get the LeechBlock extension from http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html.