Saturday, June 02, 2007

How to stop unproductive web surfing!

At work, I frequently run a process or query which may take 10 or 15 minutes to finish. Not enough time to really get another piece of work done, but just enough time to waste surfing the web. Then before you know it, the process has been done for 5 minutes, and I'm still surfing away!

So, I've devised a technique to prevent myself from web surfing certain time-wasting sites at work. This is for Internet Explorer 6.0. Go into Tools, Options, then choose the Content tab. Enable the content advisor. Then, go to Approved Sites. It's somewhat of a misnomer in this situation, because we're actually disabling websites. You can restrict yourself from whichever websites you want. The content advisor will prompt you to create a password to get to the site. I put a long string of nonsense text in there, that I'll never remember, and then pasted that string in a text file on my computer. In the password hint, I put the location of the text file. So, if I ever really want to get to a certain site that I've restricted, I can do that with just the extra step of looking up the text file. I haven't yet, though.

This simple tip has gained me a lot of time. I'm a big believer in modifying your environment to make your life better, instead of trying to use sheer willpower to do or not do things.