Back to work!
The other day I saw this tip from Matt Brown about fixing compulsive, repetitive site checking.
This really hit home with me. My fingers sometimes take over when I stop working for a minute to think, and completely of their own accord open up a new tab and take me to one of a handful of news sites. Or to twitter.
This morning I remembered a tip from Merlin Mann on 43folders about how to keep yourself from getting distracted.
So, I dug up those two tips and quickly fixed my hosts file, and replaced both the default page and the 404 page with Merlin’s Brain-in-a-Jar et voilà! Now whenever I accidentally go to my time suckers of doom, I see a brain. In a jar.
This may not work for you, but as all my local development takes place either in Django – where the server runs on port 8000 – or on MAMP – which runs on 8888 – this doesn’t really get in my way, except when it’s supposed to.
PRO TIP: You might be tempted to leave the hosts file open so you can comment out those lines for a quick peek. Don’t. You’re making them inaccessible for a reason, don’t make it easy for you to break your own rules.
