Working from home during the lock-down is very convenient. But spending time on social networking sites, online games and video streaming sites during the working hours could become counter-productive. In order to ensure that you are not wasting your productive hours on sites like Facebook and Twitter, you should make use of an extension called Intention which is available for the Firefox web browser.
Intention extension acts just like a guardian, parent, teacher or a coach. When they find out that you have been idling around, they ask you not to waste time and use it for something productive like studying or finishing the home work. In a similar fashion, Intention pauses your web browsing when it sees that you trying to access any of the time wasting sites.
After installing this extension in your Firefox web browser, you should be able to see its icon in the toolbar from where you can access its settings. The first thing you have to do is add all the distracting sites to the list that is being monitored. You can add as many distracting sites as you want. If you want to access some pages located on those sites, then you can add them to the whitelist. We can even set its schedule so that it blocks the distracting websites only within a time range everyday.
Now If you try to access these distracting sites, it will show an alert window. In this small window, you can see the time spent on that site along with the options to close that tab or unlock that tab for just 1 minute, 5 minutes or 15 minutes. The stats give you an idea about how much time you have spent on those sites.
There are also options to start the focus mode which can be run for a number of minutes during which none of the distracting sites will be allowed. During the focus mode the user will not see any options to unlock the distracting sites.
This extension works only with the help of a willing Firefox user. If the users decide to unblock a distracting site then it does not really stop them. You must be willing to work with the rules of Intention if you aim to make the most of your time with its help.
You can get the Intention extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/intention/.