Hi, this post is going to be part of a series about productivity, procrastination and how to form better habits around open-source work.

I can be a terrible procrastinator. Sometimes it’s productive procrastination, other times it’s just browsing Reddit or watching YouTube videos. With these posts I want to share some of my approaches to keep my procrastination at a non-destructive level.

In retrospect, one key part of this battle has been to move my procrastination away from the computer and internet and to only use my computer for non-procrastination things. This post describes the key parts that are working for me right now.

Firefox Extensions

I’m using two Firefox extensions to limit some of my procrastination:

Youtube Unhooked is a small extension that will block the more useless partsof youtube, such as recommendations, related videos and of course, thecomments. I found this useful mostly for hiding the related videos section.

Facebook News Feed Eradicator is another very focused extension that will hide the Facebook news feed. This is useful because I pretty much only use Facebook for the events part.

You have probably already heard of LeechBlock. It worked for me for a few weeks but I got into the habit of just going to about::addons and disabling it… Which brings me to my current solution for blocking websites.

/etc/hosts blocklist with cronjob

As a replacement for LeechBlock, I’ve been utilizing my /etc/hosts file for some time now. Editing it requires me to enter my sudo password which makes it a bit more difficult to unblock blocked sites. However, it was not difficult enough. I ended up removing sites from the file and never got around to add them again.

To solve that problem, I now have an Ansible playbook that creates a cronjob which runs every 2 minutes. The cronjob resets the /etc/hosts file to the contents of a /etc/hosts_base file where all of my go-to procrastination sites are blocked.

I have found this to work surprisingly well.

Of course, this has potential to fall apart if I start editing /etc/hosts_base But so far that hasn’t been the case.

An ongoing fight

I don’t claim to have found a perfect solution here. It’s more the case that I think that fighting procrastination is a never ending battle. I will always find some way to procrastinate. However, by at least limiting some of the bad habits on my computer, I think that I’m more likely to produce something of value when I’m using it without distractions.