LeechBlock: Oh, the tricks we play on ourselves...

It often seems that the Internet has ushered in an era of non-productivity which more than offsets the era of productivity for which it's been hailed. The culprits are those sites that leech our time away: the Facebooks, the ESPNs, the gossip sites, and the blogs (um, some blogs). How can we keep ourselves away from these leeches on our time? As is often the case in products or systems designed to curb undesirable behavior, a solution can be just to make that undesirable behavior less convenient. Enter LeechBlock, a Firefox extension by James Anderson which allows the user to block his own access to certain sites during certain times of the day. Of course, the user can always turn off this setting - he still actually has control over everything - but he appears to himself to be constrained by an outside entity. To actually return to the settings and remove the block would take conscious and premeditated action - not like the casual time-wasting into which it's so easy to slip on leech sites - and therefore force the user to admit weakness and defeat. And by golly, when that's the only other option, actually doing work starts to look a lot better!