What? Do you really do this? It would drive me insane. Every 48 minutes you're interrupted by an alarm forcing you to stop what you're doing, get up, lose your train of thought, and then start over again?
Also, you can't reliably separate the work computer from the internet one if you want to search the web for help/resources. How do you manage that?
It is impossible for me to achieve the minimum level of awesomeness that I require of articles before I publish them within just a few hours in a single day, so I'm going to switch to a 3- or 5-day publishing timespan. This will hopefully keep me from going totally insane.
For someone who so goes "insane" and finds things "impossible" so easily, perhaps you should open your mind to the success strategies of others before you criticize them so hastily. Looks like you need to be doing something differently if your 30 day website is already 4 days behind on Day 7.
I use the same thing I did to quit smoking. Sort of an OCD-like 'As Good As It Gets' technique.
Step 1. Whenever I feel the 'urge' to read e.g. HN, I close my eyes and quit my browser. Then I breathe slowly and deeply three times, holding it for about 5 secs.
Usually that does it, I regain my senses and go back to work. If it doesn't work:
Step 2. I have to stare at my screen and say, out loud, "I'm the man. I'm getting shit done. I'm King fking Kong." I try to do a victorious or chest-beating gesture as well. Usually I get a little mini-dopamine rush, and then off I go.
I rarely get to step 3. But if the first two steps don't work
Step 3. I'm not allowed to do any work for the next 120 minutes, at all. I can do whatever I want, but nothing useful or productive.
That last one is nuclear. Think about it - if every time you look at that HN toolbar button, you know you're going to lose 2 minimum hours ... would you click it?
It also helps to have free time later to enjoy HN at one's leisure (something that is obviously not the case with smoking..)
I do something similar usually stopping around 45 minutes. I've gone to this method over a couple years of trial and error and it seems to be ideal for me. I have also come across studies which show that people can only focus on something for about 40-50 minutes before losing interest. So a short break is needed after that time period to refresh.
Also I have noticed that I tend to accomplish something worthy (eg. fixing a bug, implementing a small feature) at around the 45 minute point so it is good for motivation as I can take a break knowing I have accomplished something.
Complete overkill, but my router enforces a daily limit for sites I visit too often. It's not that difficult to set up. Make a iptables chain, route all traffic that matches certain ips to that chain, add a --limit and --limit-burst counter to that chain, deny by default, allow when below said limit.
For bonus points, make all http connections redirect to your favorite todo list when you've exceeded your limit, and deny all ssh access (to the router) during working hours.
Setting it up was complete procrastination of course, but it works better than any manual block list. By slightly lowering my daily time waste allowance I can reduce the time I spend on sites like these.
EDIT:
Blocking with hosts is terrible, because you don't want to block sites permanently, and if you continually enable/disable the block list your muscle memory will unblock a site even before you realize you should be working. Cron job limits don't work when you don't have very strict working hours. Basically, you want to take a break for a few minutes every hour or so, and you need soft limits to enforce that.
We're actually pretty close to this (just soft-launched our windows version-- mac version hot on its heels). Starting with focus "toggling" ("Shut of the bad parts of the internet for 30 minutes") and moving on to nudges ("let me know when I exceed 30m of news time") and blocking ("block social networking if I exceed X hours or X %").
Disabling the internet is a baby/bathwater thing for a lot of people, I think. There's too much value there to turn it off completely (research, etc).
I intend to write something to do this soon, at the request of my wife. Basically, you need a cron job or something similar that edits /etc/hosts - shouldn't be too difficult.
But it would work better for people who don't know enough to manually edit /etc/hosts.
EDIT: the /etc/hosts thing would be to block specific sites, but it's just as easy to take the internet connection down completely with ifconfig or whatever your system uses.
http://successbeginstoday.org/wordpress/2006/09/the-power-of...
http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html