With so much available on your PC — all your friends, blogs, games and television shows — working in a modern office can often seem as rattling as working on the floor of a casino.
Sure, you could use your PC to analyze stats for the annual sales report due in two days. But hey, look at this — someone wants to be your friend on Facebook! And wait a second: A zany couple decided to start off their wedding by dancing down the aisle, and lucky for everyone, they posted the video on YouTube. And did you hear what that ignorant congressman just said about health care? Now you have no choice but to spend the next five minutes crafting an impassioned tweet to express your outrage.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been using a slate of programs to tame these digital distractions. The applications break down into three broad categories: The most innocuous simply try to monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. Others reduce visual bells and whistles on my desktop as a way to keep me focused. And then there are the ones that really mean business — they let me actively block various parts of the Internet so that when my mind strays, I am prohibited from giving in to my shiftless ways.
The first category is epitomized by a program called RescueTime, which 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…