I just did the most wondrous thing in the universe.

I installed Greasemonkey yesterday afternoon, and this morning I installed a modified version of Gina Trapani's "Invisibility Cloak". (Clicking the link will merely let you see source, no worries.)

It won't let me see certain web sites from my Mozilla browser here at work. I have it configured to block access to Livejournal and to games.yahoo.com between the hours of 8am and 5pm. I'm sure the instant I get a flickr account I'll block that one too, and I'll find more as time goes on.

I disabled the script just to come here and crow. Now I will re-enable it and until 5PM, as the alert button will tell me, I'll "get back to work!"

Yay me!

Productivity Illusion

While I may FEEL more productive if I can't access LJ at work, at the end of the day I'm not sure I'd gotten any more done than on any other day.

Darn. I'd been so hoping I would magically turn into a whirlwind of Super-Coder efficiency. (There's something about working at a startup that makes me desperately want to be superhuman.)

Maybe I have been guilting myself over something that didn't actually make much difference. When I'm working a hard problem, I take breaks. I have to. I rapidly become useless if I don't let my brain shake itself out every so often. Maybe whether those breaks are LJ or not doesn't matter.

Hard to say, this early. I'll give it more time. Maybe this change is merely a small positive thing.