Anti-Procrastinator

Do you find yourself impulsively checking certain websites when you should be working? I do. In fact its become so automatic for me that I barely notice I’m doing it until I’ve opened about 10 tabs and each of them contains something more interesting than my work.

I’ve tried various internet anti-procrastination extensions for Firefox, but they all seem to do the same thing – limit the amount of time you spend on certain websites. Personally, this doesn’t work for me. They pop up while I’m halfway through reading or watching something, and eventually I just get sick of the rude messages and uninstall the extension.

So what if you could surf the site for as long as you like without interruptions AND be more productive? Its not possible you say? Well, I’ve written my own script to test this theory. Its only a couple of days old so I haven’t tested it thouroughly yet, but I think its working. Basically it has two functions:

Stops you from impulsively checking time-sink websites really often.
Offers words of encouragement =)

When you check a website, eg facebook, the time is recorded. You can surf the website as long as you like (theoretically you’ll eventually get bored) but once you stop surfing the site – ie stop opening tabs/clicking links – you won’t be allowed to access the site for another five hours.

That’s right, five hours. I know it seems like a long time, but if you’re like me you’ll realise that don’t really need to check those sites more than once per day. In the future I’ll provide options to change that length.

You’ll need to be using Firefox to install this script.

How to Install

Download and install Greasemonkey.
Restart Firefox

How to Use

Right click on the little Greasemonkey icon in the statusbar and click ‘Manage User Scripts’.
Click ‘Anti-Procrastinator’ in the list on the left.
Click ‘Add…’ in the Included Pages section.
Enter a website you’d like to limit, using wildcard (*). Some examples: