I talked before about discipline. I’ve fallen back into the habit of reloading my reader if there is a moment of down time. Here’s what I did to fix that:

I dusted off an old computer that wasn’t being used, and I installed Ubuntu on it. I placed this old computer on a book shelf across the room from my desk. It’s not a convenient place for a computer to sit because I have to stand to use it.

I have a router that allows my family’s computers to all be connected to the internet. Normally on a home network the router will assign a dynamic IP address to any computer that tries to connect. That’s how mine was until I set up my main computer with a static address — that means the address never changes, and is always reversed for that one computer.

Once I created a static IP address, I was able to tell the router: Do not allow the computer at that address to access this list of sites, between 6:00am and 6:00pm.

So now I have a main computer which is free to search for, say, code snippets, or stock photography, but cannot go to my rss feed, my e-mail, or any forums I frequent during business hours. To go there, I have to walk across the room, get on my linux desktop, and stand up while I access any of those.

I’ve created a barrier between my wandering brain and the work I need to get done! Take that, ADD!

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