Michelle McGinnis

I’ve just discovered a wonderful thing, a lifesaving, marvelous, adorable thing: Leechblock.

This gem of a Firefox plugin allows me to block myself from viewing certain sites at certain times of the day. (Leeching away my valuable writing time.)

It’s simple: when I sit down to write, I enable Leechblock by selecting “Lockdown” for a certain amount of time. I can still get to Wikipedia to look up that all-important street name I need for a scene, but I can’t get to Gmail or News of the Weird or IMDB YouTube or any of the blogs I follow.

Voila! The best thing about this plugin is that it’s smart. It has options to disable its own options while a block is active (! get your head around that!) so that my very tech-savvy inner procrastinator doesn’t do a system runaround and turn the internet back on when I’m jonesing for a fix.

Check out the plugin author’s site to get a full list of the many terrific options.