You sit down on the computer to complete that sales report which is extremely urgent but you are distracted by an email from a colleague asking you to check the "funniest video" ever posted on YouTube.
You open that video on YouTube, watch it for five minutes and then switch to Orkut to check the new scraps. Then you move to Facebook followed by Google Reader, then Technorati, then Wikipedia, then CNN and so on. You soon realize that you wasted an hour at work Wilfing while the task at hand (the status report) remains incomplete.
Sites like CNN, Facebook, Google News or Orkut are certainly not bad for health but our constant urge to check sites for new content certainly distracts us from actual work leaving us less productive and at times, inefficient.
There's some help at hand from LeechBlock, a firefox extension that will prevent you from browsing websites that you alone specify. It's like a self-imposed restriction to help you concentrate on work. [concept is similar to WriteRoom - hide the distractions]
The interesting part about LeechBlock is that you can specify the time periods and even the days of the week when access to particular sites should be restriced. Such time-specific blocking of sites is impossible to achieve through Windows hosts or Adblock route.
LeechBlock (Firefox Addons) | Developer Home
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