The internet used to eat away a large portion of my day, especially social networking sites, forums, blogs or information-dense sites where the amount of “interesting” information is so much, you never actually get to the point where you find the information you were looking for in order to work productively. Same goes for sites like Linkedin where you are supposedly networking amongst business people, yet very few people actually stick to using it as a networking tool and before you know it, you’ll be browsing and browsing and browsing Linkedin profiles the whole day instead of actively networking amongst real business people to get some real business done.

The same principle applies to instant messaging; even though it’s a very useful tool to stay in touch, how much does your productivity suffer when you have all 600+ myspace contacts, 400+ facebook contacts, 150+ GTalk contacts, 50+ YIM contacts, 50+ MSN contacts and 50+ Skype contacts loaded into Pidgin at the same time and one of those people decides to start a conversation every now and again. Pretty soon, you’ll have your whole desktop full of chat windows and any form of productivity will cease to exist. I find that MSN and YIM contacts are the biggest chatters (statistically proven – anyone has a 100 Million to waste in researching to why this is the case?) as well as facebook contacts who assume you’re available for chat since you’re always displaying online (thanks to the facebook plugin for Pidgin). I used to have a custom developed MXIT plugin for Pidgin as well, but removed it within the first few days after realizing that a permanent online presence on MXIT means a gazillion “howzit” popups a day. (haven’t used my account in years, wonder if it still exist, lol) Eventually I decided to just use Skype and ONLY open Pidgin (with all the IM protocols enabled) when I really don’t have anything better to do (which hardly happens).

Those who complain that they can’t get hold of me, I have told to send an email or use the good ol’ telephone. It actually reminds me of an infamous computer science lecturer who gave up on email and placed a permanent auto-responder on his email account telling people to fax him if it’s important while asking his secretary to choose the three most important faxes each day and to throw the rest away. He only responded to the three most important faxes and then continued his research – guess why he received over a thousand faxes day …

One tool which will time your online presence is called TimeTracker, a Firefox plugin which will simply display a clock on your status bar telling you that you have spent x amount of time inside Firefox in the last 24 hours.

TimeTracker

Even though this might motivate some people to waste less time online, it’s hardly effective if a lot of the work you’re doing, requires an open browser.

The solution is LeechBlock, limit your time per group of sites to x amount of minutes a day (or per any time period you want) and let Firefox physically block your access to these sites after you run out of time credits. I’ve allocated a whooping total of ten minutes to all social networking sites during a 24 hour day, that means once I access one of the social networking sites on the list, the timer starts running for all of them and after ten minutes, all of them are blocked.

LeechBlock is a simple productivity tool: an extension for the Firefox web browser designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. (You know: the ones that rhyme with ‘Blue Cube’, ‘Pie Face’, ‘Space Hook’, ‘Hash Pot’, ‘Sticky Media’, and the like.) All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them.

You can specify up to six sets of sites to block, with different times and days for each set. You can block sites within fixed time periods (e.g., between 9am and 5pm), after a time limit (e.g., 10 minutes in every hour), or with a combination of time periods and time limit (e.g., 10 minutes in every hour between 9am and 5pm). With the ‘lockdown’ feature, you can block sites immediately for a specified duration. You can also set a password or random access code for LeechBlock’s options, just to slow you down in moments of weakness!

The sites to block can be specified using wildcards (e.g., *.somesite.com) and exceptions (e.g., +allowme.somesite.com).

LeechBlock also keeps track of the total amount of time you have spent browsing the sites in each block set.

Back at varsity, a buddy used to disassemble his computer when it was exam time, very extreme, but it seemed to have worked for him. My current setup of productivity boosting tools are (and have been) working wonders for me (combined with the fact that I don’t sleep nearly as much as the average person which gives me even more time). Uninstalling useless, time-consuming social networking applications will also free a lot of your time, especially applications like humanpets, farmville and the tons of other garbage / useless applications people get sucked into.

Feel free to share what productivity boosting methods and tools work for you.