What you do to restrict yourself from browsing internet unnecessarily?

Question

I find myself browsing internet all the time and most of the time unnecessarily. I do find some interesting stuffs, learn something new daily. But I think most of the time I browse internet without any purpose. When I finish my basic tasks such as checking email, reading couple of news and browsing stackoverflow, I either go to Digg or Stumble through different sites and I find myself lost. I want to ask those who have gone through the similar situations. How do you restrict yourself from browsing internet unnecessarily?

Answer 1

Answer 2

Check this questions:

• Efficient workday
• How do you beat procrastination?

Do you have a boss? :-)

Answer 3

The same way I "restrict" myself from any other detrimental behaviors: I weigh the benefits and the consequences. This method also works for my 7-year-old.

Answer 4

I'm very ADD while I'm doing research so it's a very common problem for me. What I do (on my mac) is that I disable the network. there's about a 20 second delay to get everything running again once I've been disconnected (from wired). That's usually enough to make me give up.

Answer 5

Not a problem. But it's an interesting question. I think I saw something recently about that on one site or another. I'll check a few sites and see if I can find out why the rest of you are susceptible. I'll be back after I check a bit ...

Answer 6

I clear my Google Reader list every morning, after that there is nothing else of interest to me on the Internet and wait to the next morning for news.

Answer 7

What I read someone does is they do all their work on a computer that's disconnected from the internet. They put the one connected to the internet in another room. This requires them to actually make an effort to just 'check something on the internet', and is a big enough detriment to prevent him from doing it for those random things that waste time.

Answer 8

I have a little trick that seems to make it easier to end a research session. If I am browsing reddit, for example, I will scroll down the page finding stories that I like, and I will open each one in a new tab. Then I close the tab that lists stories and read the ones that I previously opened. When I finish each one, I close it. When I close the last one, I am done. I know it sounds silly, but I find it easier to close the page that lists stories when I know that I have a few stories yet to read, and I find it easier to stop entirely if the story list is closed.

Answer 9

If I absolutely positively have to get some work done in a short time span, I'll usually just completely shut off the network connection. After about the third time I try to launch IM client, RSS reader, whatever, I get the idea and buckle down to work.