The alarm wakes me up at 9 am. I rub my eyes and think about all the things I want to get done today: take care of the discussion post for one class, read half of a chapter for another, go over keywords for that exam on Friday. It’s going to be a busy day! But first… let’s pick up the phone and browse Reddit, just for a few minutes, of course.
“Hey, that’s a cool camping trip photo. Oh, look! An article on camping gear, let’s check it out! Oh wow, a video on kayaks, I HAVE to watch that. Hey, what time is it? 12 O’CLOCK?! What? How?!”
“Well… I guess I didn’t NEED to go over the keywords for the exam… and I can probably just read a quarter of that chapter and do the discussion post. Okay, let’s get to it! But first… what’s going on on Facebook?”
Does this sound familiar? Yeah, it’s not fun, is it? We live in the digital age where information and mental stimulation is as abundant as oxygen. “Just a few minutes” quickly turns into an hour, which quickly turns into two. Even when kept to small bursts and divided throughout the day, the way all of these distraction intervals add up can be terrifying when you look at the loss of productivity.
Late last year, I found a solution that has helped me immensely: content blockers.
For the last couple of months, I have been using a content blocker called Freedom to restrict what I look at and when. The program lets me create “blocklists” that are composed of specific websites or even all websites of a category, such as social media, news, shopping, etc.
From there, you select the blocklist you want to be used and set the time for the session, whether it’s 30 minutes or three hours, and you’re off. Those sites are forbidden for that time frame on all the devices that you have set up and selected.
The blocklist feature has been helpful to me because of the different work I do in school. For example, when working on my social media posts for my Social Media Strategy class, I have a blocklist that enables me to use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, but not irrelevant platforms like Reddit. When I’m reading for my marketing class, I use a blocklist that disables all of these platforms so that I can read without distraction.
I highly recommend using a content blocker such as this with a basic daily checklist and schedule and setting your block sessions accordingly, which will help you stay on track. Freedom even lets you schedulable a blocking session ahead of time or for recurring time frames, so you can let the program do the hard work for you.
If you are working from home or currently in school and tend to frequently get distracted and take “Just a few minutes” breaks, I highly recommend looking into content blockers. Doing so and keeping a schedule lets you be more in control of your time, including when to take breaks and how long they last. In short, using a content blocker is perhaps the best decision I’ve made in quite some time.
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