Stupid Productivity Trick

Or how I keep myself from wasting hours on news.yc and reddit

I use LeechBlock to keep myself from wasting hours of my life on reddit and news.yc. I have time scheduled in to the day when I can browse to whatever I want, but for the bulk of my day I have the time wasters blocked.

But that’s not the productivity trick I’m going to write about today.

Since I’m a geek, I have a few browsers installed, and so I have reflexively learned that when LeechBlock presents me with a blank white screen, I should open Galeon instead. No productivity gained there, and it is unfortunate, because I’m often browsing to avoid thinking.

Short of implementing any of the DNS tricks to block time wasters, I’ve symlinked the offending browser commands to a script that contains the following:

notify-send -u critical "Get back to work" "Do you really need $0 right now?"

The symlinked look-alike is ahead of the real applications in my path, so it gets picked up and executed. Most of the time that is enough to jolt me out of distraction, and in truly dire circumstances I can always manually execute the full path to the time sucking browser that I desire.