I can procrastinate with the best of them. I think I've done 1 hour's work today if I'm brutally honest, so something has to give.

The Lifehacker website (a website which reviews ideas for getting things done) is pretty good for this sort of stuff. Some ideas are just plain daft but some are genuinely quite useful.

The LeechBlock download seems interesting and cuts straight to the core of how I procrastinate (i.e. it blocks user-determined websites during user-determined work hours). The best bit is the option to stopping you from hacking in to unblock sites during work hours. I'll give it a try and see if it actually can reform the error of Sylvester's ways or whether I'm an incorrigible procrastinator! Unfortunately, this website might have to go on the block list. Hmmm.

Does anyone else have this or tried anything similar?

http://lifehacker.com/374812/save-yourself-from-time-sinks-online-with-leechblock

Well I haven't tried this BUT I've been looking for something like this for ages!!! I'm a bit concerned about downloading it though...but it is listed on the FireFox add-ons page and it has lots of good reviews. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

As long as it's not some shady adware programme I think I'll go for it!

Okay ...so everyone should admit which sites will be on their leech list:
yahoo mail
yahoo news videos
flickr
youtube
BBC iplayer
The Guardian
The Times
My gossip hits: Daily Mail & perezhilton :$ (I know, I know).

I'm configuring it now, so far so good and my firewall hasn't detected any unusual activity. It took me about 5 minutes to set up. I created a group (you can have up to 6 groups) called "Procrastination" containing (among others) Facebook, Youtube, BBC News, The Guardian and, dare I say it, Postgraduateforum.com (so my worst offenders). I'm blocked between 900-1300 and 1400-1700 every week day and I've set it so I can't disable it during the blocking time. Another neat feature is Lockdown. Say, like me, you are nocturnal working tonight, you can press the Lockdown option at anytime of day and tell it to block me from all my "Procrastination" websites for, say, the next 4 hours. I also notice that it will log the amount of time you spend browsing sites in each of your groups when you're not in blocked time. My Procrastination group is currently reading 26 minutes for the last 30 minutes! A word of caution, you can set it to require a random 64 digit password in order to access the Options tab. Don't switch this on (if at all) until you've got all of your websites listed. It took me 2 painstaking minutes to type in the darned password but I guess that's the idea - to discourage you from meddling. I like it though we'll have to see if I persevere with it over time!

Ha Rosy, I forgot about just clicking on IE. I'll have to uninstall it. Firefox is quicker anyway (so they say) and imports all of IE favourites. Just don't tell me about more gossip sites. ;-) I must also add amazon and this forum to the leech list !

Sylvester, the lockdown feature sounds excellent too. My work hours are very variable.

======= Date Modified 03 Sep 2008 00:26:20 =======
Still tinkering here. A slight reprieve for this website and BBC News - I've moved them out of outright block during the set working hours into a new group I've called "Quota". I'm allowed no more than 10 minutes (for the whole group) in every 2 hour period which could be a tad frustrating if I'm writing a post and my time runs out! Eeerily, once this is switched on, a clock appears on the Firefox status bar counting down how long you have left of your 10 minutes. 5 minutes and 32 seconds left for me tonight!

Lol, so you spent more time working out how to stop procastinating then actually working on your phd??

======= Date Modified 03 Sep 2008 16:47:52 =======
So I have this up and running now - and it does work!!! There is an easy way to override it though - just change the time on your computer (but then if you're tempted to do this click 'Lockdown').

Few problems:
I can't find where the countdown clock is when I have it on 'Lockdown' - do you know where this is??? I have a countdown clock showing how much time I have left on this site before I'm locked out again...but when lockdown is on does it show how long before the lockdown finishes?

Also, what do the LeechBlock Statistics measure? I think it's measuring my 'leech time' i.e., how long I'm on the sites I shouldn't be using. This will shame me into working!

Also I changed the Leech Block site page to this: http://www.qualitynonsense.com/downloads/gtd-wallpaper.jpg
I think it gets the message across :-)

Lockdown doesn't display the clock in the status bar, but if you go to the Leechblock menu and click Lockdown it will tell you at what time the Lockdown ends . The Leechblock statistics do indeed total up your procrastination time in each of your set groups.

H, it actually takes a few minutes to set up, but i went back to it to tweak it a bit. I like it but as Missspacey says, i can defeat it if so choose to. Let's see if I can resist...

Ah...okay so I have wasted 2 hours today on my leech sites :$

It is a very good tool - especially now I have a screen popping up saying 'stop messing around and do some work'.

Sylvester...does this thing work with Internet Explorer or only firefox? If so how can i download firefox...I think this is just what i need as i spend far too much time on websites and not on my work!!