Tool of the Trade: LeechBlock

Update: If you’re looking for a similar way to help with focus on Chrome, you may also want to check out Morphine. 

In this feature, we’ll explore one tool that makes the busy woman’s life easier in some small way.

The thing we keep hearing from our lawyer friends is that the pay is great, but the job is unbelievably boring about 75% of the time. And almost everyone we know has a problem with distraction — you’re at the office for long stretches doing boring things like reading transcripts (it’s hard to think of something we hate more) and then Perez Hilton starts to call, or the new sale at Net-A-Porter… trust us, we HEAR you, sista. So you spend “working hours” avoiding work by playing on the Internet, and then you have to stay late to actually, you know, do the work. And by staying late, you further blur the line between work and your personal life. It’s a bad, bad thing.

So we were thrilled to find LeechBlock. It’s a free add-on for Firefox Mozilla (our preferred browser of choice) that will block certain sites for time periods that you choose. (You know, the sites that suck your time away.) So, for example, one of the biggest leeches of our time is our RSS reader: Bloglines. We love it — a little bit too much. We still haven’t fully forgiven our friend who introduced us to it. (Just kidding, M!) (Not really.) Anyway, we set the options like this:

And after 10 minutes of viewing different feeds, we’re not allowed to look at the site again until two hours have elapsed. After the time is up, the next link we click on gets us a “Blocked” screen (see above). What’s great about is you can create a bunch of different rules for different kinds of sites — limit yourself to one hour per week of playing on social networking sites like Facebook*, LinkedIn, etc. Limit yourself to one hour per day of browsing different shopping sites. The program will even keep statistics for you, so you know how much time you’re wasting on various things. And that is exactly what you want, right?

Oh, and if you haven’t yet downloaded Firefox, you can do so by clicking the link in our sidebar. (It’s a great program! We really recommend!)

* Incidentally, Corporette joined Facebook! Come be a Fan. (We’re still trying to figure out if we should have just set up a group, but, oh well.)