Improve Your Productivity in One Step - Go Offline!
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The internet is truly a wonderland. Thousands of news stories, blogs, games, videos, social networking sites, all lie tantalizingly beneath your fingertips, just waiting to be explored. I know some of you can't live without SgForums or the Homework Forum but it has proven time and time again. I've experienced multiple productive surges when I take myself off the internet.
Don’t surf the internet on study time.
Some buildings in my school don’t have wireless. I remember being stuck inside my school once in a rainstorm after school. So I decided to hole up in an unused classroom with my laptop rather than brave the heavy rain. (I brought the laptop for presentation.)
At first, I didn’t have anything to do. My routine is to check my mail, then read some news, then check my mail again, then my RSS Reader, then more mail. After that, I do some work, and check mail again. (Does this sound familiar?)
With no internet, I couldn’t check my mail, and the whole process was stopped before it started. Then, a miracle happened. Wanting desperately to avoid boredom, I started working on the first thing I could find — and finished, rather quickly. Then I found something else, finished it, and moved onto a third task. By the time the rain subsided, I had finished three rather unpleasant tasks that I had been putting off for weeks.
Since that incident, I’ve taken myself off the internet on a number of occasions, and it has resulted in productivity gains every single time. One of the secrets to being productive is to schedule uninterruptible periods. Even if you are working diligently most of the time, the thirty second break to check email or facebook can set you back as many as five or six minutes when you consider the time spent getting re-focused.
“Very well,” you may be saying to yourself, “but what if I need the internet for my work? Is there any way I can have the best of both worlds?”
It turns out that there is. Invisibility Cloak is a Greasemonkey script written by Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani. It allows you to create a blacklist of sites and specify a time period during which they will be blocked. For instance, you can block *.facebook.com and youtube.com between 12:00 AM and 8:00 PM, which means that your browser will prevent you from accessing that page except for four hours at night.
You can configure the script in Firefox by going to Tools => Greasemonkey => Manage User Scripts, and selecting Invisibility Cloak from the menu on the left.In order to change the period, you will need to edit the Javascript file with an editor (Notepad works just fine). Just click the Edit button in the lower left hand corner on the pop-up window and it will open the associated Javascript file. Find the following four lines:
// EDIT THE NEXT LINE TO SET THE HOUR AFTER WHICH SITES SHOULD APPEAR
// HOURS IN MILITARY TIME, SO 15 = 3PM
var surf_time_after = 15;
// END EDITEdit the value of surf_time_after as per the instructions, save, and go back to Firefox. If you want, you can also change the message that appears when you try to access a blocked site. I changed it to something rather derogatory. Here’s the line you need to alter. Just change the text inside the parenthesis (keep the quotation marks).
alert(”You can surf after “+ readable_time + “; right now, get back to work!”);
Do give this script a spin - it works remarkably well, even though there is a very simple way to disable it (if enough people want to know how to do this, I will post an answer in the comments). Also, if you have anything to add on the subject of going offline to increase productivity, please feel free to comment for the benefit of other readers. I’m also an avid comment reader, so I look forward to it as well, although not often.
Since I do not frequent SgForums as much, I can be reached on both MSN and Email at the following address:
AlsonKaw [at] PixelRebels.uni.cc -
12 views and not a single comment =(
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U just need some self-discipline.
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Yes indeed. But not many people are able to do it. I myself is unable to really disconnect myself from the internet.
So normally I just close my macbook/power off my mac and just find a quiet place to sit and revise. -
I often waste my whole day away on the Internet.
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ok wad.
i can do it.
i just finish wad i wan to finish before i switch my laptop on.
or i can even on my laptop (with the lid shut but running), den study like for one or two hrs...before i open the lid again...
it is all abt discipline. some pple can, some pple just cannot. my brother switched on his desktop all the way while revising for O level and he played two matches of pro evolution football twice after every 1 and a half hour of revision.
result? 9As. (7 A1 and 2 A2)
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Originally posted by seotiblizzard:
U just need some self-discipline.
this is the only important factor -
Yup... Discipline is the key. But often there's always "Check mail" on my mind. Heard it was a psychological problem XD
Anyway... with applets like StumbleUpon and Digg, it's really hard to stop. I've tried stumbling for 1 whole day without stopping lmao.
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Its all in the mind.
