Leech lover

I have an internet problem, I admit it. But I don't have to accept it, and this week thanks to a suggestion from a faculty author I looked into software to tame the web. The author suggested Freedom, but it is only for Macs. Then I read about Leechblock, downloaded it for Firefox, and got busy setting it up to block certain sites after certain lengths of time.

This article by Farhad Manjoo of the The New York Times is illuminating and also a little nauseating -- he's right when he says of RescueTime, "[it] keeps track of everything that happens on your computer, and then reports your habits in a series of charts and graphs. I found the software’s analysis tremendously illuminating. I learned, for instance, that during a typical month I spend more than 70 hours surfing the Web, much of it on news and social-networking sites. By comparison, I spend only about half as much time in Microsoft Word, which, as a writer, is where I do my work. Seeing these stats knocked me over; clearly, I wasn’t using my time very wisely."

Me either.

And so far so good with Leechblock, but I'll post an update later.