During the work day, interrupts from e-mail or social media can lead me to compose e-mails or get sidetracked, 20 web searches away, hot on the hunt for answers to interesting questions raised by the latest forwarded content. Today I discovered a useful, free application called SelfControl (http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/) that blocks your computer from accessing certain domains such as Facebook.com, Twitter.com, or incoming mail servers. It blocks these connections for a fixed period of time and it is nearly impossible to disable once you’ve started the clock. It is just as if I were going into a meeting where I wouldn’t normally be checking my e-mail, but this meeting is with my own mental creativity team.
RescueTime has a similar feature called “Get Focused” which uses their database of distraction ratings to turn off all sites you have labeled as Very Distracting. Unfortunately, there isn’t yet a way to add your e-mail to this service so SelfControl provides a useful extra bit of filtering.
(It’s really too bad this doesn’t apply to my spare computer, my iphone, ipad or my wife’s computer…but technology only takes us so far in supporting behavior change)
Frumious Abstractions 
Loving your blog. You should selfcontrol yourself to making more posts!
Thanks Adam! You are quite right. However, it’s a beautiful summer here in CA and biking is eating up most of my blogging time. 🙂 I will probably pick up the pace again in the Fall, though I have a few posts in draft form to finish up sooner such as a blog post about optimizing bicycling performance.