Matthew Gates http://www.notetoservices.com 6m 1,518 #stayfocused
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Block Distractions and Stay Focused At Work
You have work to do and a deadline to meet, yet you continue to allow yourself to get distracted. After all, what is a few minutes of reading a few news articles, scanning YouTube for new music, or Facebook and Twitter for the streaming feed which updates you on current events. No, really, you need to focus, get away from all that, and get your work done. Those few minutes over the course of a day can add up to at least an hour or two of lost productivity over the week and you must now focus on your work.
Have you ever finished visiting your favorite website, closed the tab, re-opened a new tab, and typed in that same exact website again even though you were done browsing it? You may not even realize yourself doing it or how often you do it, but you open up a new tab and you type in your favorite website as an automatic reaction. Maybe every time you open up a browser, you have several websites that open up by default. By becoming aware of your habits, you can change them. You may just need the right tools to make you aware of what you are doing and prevent you from visiting your favorite websites that you do not need to be visiting while at work or even at home, because you are visiting way too often.
You could easily train yourself to get your work done first and then have pleasure in trolling your favorite social media websites later, but you may just lack the willpower to do so. At home, you may want to be more productive while your on the computer or do something else other than mindlessly trolling your favorite websites. That is why Internet comes filled with tools to help you help yourself. You could spend hours reading articles about training yourself to avoid distractions, and maybe you well should, or you could just get straight to the point, and download these tools and set yourself up to be blocked from your procrastination mentality. Why do today… because it’s due today!
Here are several tips along tools from each of the popular web browsers to help you block yourself from doing everything but your work.
Chrome Extensions
This is probably one of the best and most unforgiving blockers out there. The only way to actually disable or change options is to wait until your time is up again or disable the plugin completely. This extension comes with a variety of options from allowing a certain amount of time on your blocked websites, allowing you to access blocked websites on only certain days of the week, to allowing you to visit blocked websites between certain hours. A “Nuclear” option exists for blocking instantly. You can also set a challenge for yourself to unblock the website. The challenge is difficult but not impossible. This will further thwart your attempts to unblock yourself from websites that you specifically set to be blocked for a reason.
This extension has a great feature that limits your time on your blocked websites to the time you chose. Choose as much time as you want to limit yourself, though 10, 20, 30, 45, or 60 minutes is recommended. After that, you are blocked from the website until the reset time. If you use up all of your time in the morning, you cannot get on to the website until the next morning. Imagine how much time you would dedicate to each visit and how productive you would try to be if your time on the clock was running out the moment you landed on the website. Try it for a week!
Add your website to a block list and enable the plugin. You will be unable to visit the website. You also have the option of hiding the plugin from the extension menu, making it harder for you to try and disable the extension.
This extension comes with the ability to block websites along with block certain keywords that appear in the URL. The extension comes with a list of pre-set adult blocked words that may prevent against visiting adult-only websites. You may redirect blocked pages to a different page. You can also set a password requirement in order to uninstall the extension.
Nanny for Chrome
You may block websites for certain times of the day or limit the hours per day a website can be visited. Nanny will close the tab before you have a chance to land on the page, but there is an option to redirect the page to another website. You can also set up a challenge for removing blocked websites from the list. You can have Nanny show you a list of blocked URLs each time, how much time is left on those blocked URLs, and the settings for those blocked URLs, or you can turn off that feature so you are not left with the reminder of what you blocked.
Firefox Add-Ons
Enable all the options. Make sure the “Blacklist” radio button is ticked, as well as “Enable Block Site,” “Enable Warning Messages” and “Enable Link Removal.” Add the websites you want to block. Enter in a password for authentication if you want to require a password to prevent blocked websites from being removed. You are all set for blocking websites.
Opera
Click on preferences, click advanced, and choose content. The content blocking tool is now enabled. To block entire web sites, with the content blocking tool active, click Add in the upper right hand corner of the screen. You are then prompted to add a URL. Enter the website address you wish to block into the URL field.
Safari
On a Mac OS X, get into System Preference, Parental Controls, and click on the Lock (Click the lock to prevent further changes) if you have a password enabled. Click on your user account or add a new one. Click on the Web tab. Click on Try to Limit Access to Adult Websites Automatically option. Select Custom sites. Add your sites. You can also extend this feature to additional web browsers by clicking on Apps and finding the web browsers you want to have the same functionality.
Internet Explorer
Click on Tools, Security, and Restricted Sites, Sites. Add the websites you want to block.
Hosts File
The Hosts file is used by computers to map IP address and hosts names for all websites. If it does not have it, it will ask the DNS server to translate it into an IP address. In short, typing in this IP address, 74.125.224.72, will take you to www.google.com. The Hosts file also has an extremely useful feature that will block all websites without the usage of a plugin and is available on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux computers.
Windows
Location: %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\ or C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\
The file is called hosts. Open it with Notepad.
Add this line to the hosts file:
127.0.0.1 website.com
Replace website.com with the website you want to block.
For example, if you wanted to block access to Facebook, you would add this line:
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
Save the file and you are good to go. You should no longer be able to access the websites you entered.
If the websites are still working, you will have to flush the DNS cache.
Caution: Make sure you start adding websites under this line: 127.0.0.1 localhost.
Mac OS
Open up the Application called Terminal.
Type this line in:
sudo nano /etc/hosts
Or:
Click on the Finder Menu, select Go and click on Go To Folder and enter in this line:
/private/etc/hosts
Add this line:
127.0.0.1 website.com
Replace website.com with the website you want to block.
For example, if you wanted to block access to Facebook, you would add this line:
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
If you opened the file via Terminal:
Press the Control + O key.
Type in this line in order to refresh the DNS cache:
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache
If you opened the file in TextEdit, than hit save and close the file.
You should no longer be able to access the websites you entered.
If you can still access the blocked websites, you will have to flush the DNS cache.
Caution: Make sure you start adding websites under this line: 127.0.0.1 localhost.
Linux
Open Terminal.
Type in this line:
sudo cp /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.bak
Type in this line:
sudo sh -c ‘echo “127.0.0.1 http://website.com” >> /etc/hosts’
Replace website.com with the website you want to block.
For example, if you wanted to block access to Facebook, you would add this line:
sudo sh -c ‘echo “127.0.0.1 https://facebook.com” >> /etc/hosts’
Hit enter and the websites will be blocked.
If you can still access the blocked websites, you will have to flush the DNS cache.
Caution: Make sure you start adding websites under this line: 127.0.0.1 localhost.
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