An Unexpected Procrastination Prevention Strategy

I can usually manage to stay away from time-sinkholes like Facebook and Twitter day to day, but when my self-control is put in the ring with technology news and scientific articles, I rarely make it past the first round. I love reading about what is essentially the future, and also discovering how things work, respectively. More of a problem is the fact that I can halfway justify time spent reading these things, on the claim that they make me a more well-rounded professional... but after a certain point, it becomes obvious that that is an excuse more than a rational reason.

Ok, so there's the problem. Now what?

Instead of using one of the dozen plugins for Firefox in the genre of Control Your Surfing Habits, or, Hand Your Self-control to the Computer, I discovered a way that works just as effectively for me. For most, it will not be novel, or even new, but its unexpected efficacy is what prompts the entry.

Generally upon reading one article, and still not feeling particularly ambitious about getting back to useful activities, I need only to glance around the present webpage and something likewise interesting will catch my eye, and thus goes my time.

The Unexpected Solution: By importing all my frequently-visited sites into a feed reader, I take back control. Instead of being bombarded by the self-referential advertising that these sites do (because basically everything other than the content on the websites are ads; they just happen to be ads selling a visit to a different page on the same site), I am free to read through the updates to the sites I deem worth following, but those sites only. If there are no new updates to those select sites' feeds, then I am sitting in front of an empty feed reader, with no attention-catching ads to other interesting things, and that is enough to prevent me from going off to find something to procrastinate on some more.

Sometimes putting one more step, in this case the jarring feeling of No New Items, in between an allowable activity and a blatant act of procrastination is all it takes to keep from sliding down the slippery slope.

I use the web-based Google Reader, and it is pretty fantastic. In the past, I've used Feed Demon, a desktop feed reader application.