FARHAD MANJOO ESSAY


Is there any human invention more duplicitous than the personal computer? These machines were manufactured and initially marketed as devices to help us at work.

Boy, that turned out well, didn’t it? Sure, you could use your PC to analyze stats for the annual sales report . But 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 they posted the video on YouTube. And did you hear what that ignorant congressman just said about health care?

And so it goes: You get to your PC every morning with hours of productive time ahead of you. Next thing you know, it’s 5 p.m. and you’ve spent most of the day on news blogs, watching old TV shows and your fantasy sports league.

Recently, I’ve been using a variety of programs to tame these digital distractions. They fall into three categories. The most innocuous monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. Others reduce visual distractions on my desktop to keep me focused.

And then there are those that let me actively block various parts of the Internet .

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 charts and graphs. I found its analysis tremendously illuminating.

I learned, for instance, that in a typical month I spend more than 70 hours surfing the Web, much of it on news and social-networking sites. I spend only about half as much time in Microsoft Word, which, as a writer, is where I do my work. Clearly, I wasn’t using my time very wisely.

For stronger medicine, there’s LeechBlock, a free add-on for the Firefox browser that works like a stern nanny: You tell it which Web sites to keep you away from, and at the appointed hour, it stops you . Try to go to Facebook and you get a warning to go back to work.

But LeechBlock suffers a crucial limitation: if you want to get around it, all you have to do is load up another browser. One Mac application that has found a way to solve this problem is called Freedom, which blocks all of your computer’s networking functions for a predetermined number of minutes. In other words, once you set it, you’ve got no Web, no instant messaging, no e-mail-and the only way to undo Freedom’s block is to restart your machine.

I wish I could say these digital nannies revolutionized the way I work. They didn’t, really. But I did notice that net-blocking software got me to at least consider all the ways that I was wasting my time. When Leech- Block threw a roadblock in my path, it gave me pause; when I went around it, I was at least conscious that it wasn’t the right thing to do. Sometimes a little shame is all you need.