Self Control: Block Distracting Sites to get your Stuff Done

Is facebook, tumblr and twitter sucking away all your time on the internet? Is there one site that you obsess over every minute and is distracting you? I’ve had friends who told me they spend too much time on facebook when they should be studying for an exam, and I’ve had quite an experience myself with trying to get over a website addiction, so here is the ultimate way:

Focalfilter

(Click to download the program.)

This is a free program that lets you block certain websites for 15 minutes to 12 hours. I find that it’s much easier to have the self discipline to put the website into this program and click on the “block” than actually stop visiting the site.

You can find other alternatives such as Firefox/Chrome extensions that do the same job, but I haven’t tried them yet.

Getting over an Addiction is Hard

You’re going to go into withdrawal modes for sure, and you may even check them nonstop, even though every time you do that, it gives you this “page can’t be found error”. It can take 3-4 days to even get used to it before you just check without thinking, but IT WORKS SO WELL!

Let me tell you my story:

Statcounter is the website that shows me stats on my website, but whenever I start a new site, I become very obsessed with checking to see who is viewing, to the point where I am always checking and getting distracted. Also, it’s easy to feel discouraged for ANYONE who just starts a site and notices that very few people are finding it, so I’ve decided that it was time to block this site, to actually let it be out of my reach so I don’t waste so much time going crazy over this, I can just focus on content creation for this site.

You may have a story on why you need to block a site, which I’d love to hear!