There is a Google labs add-on that lets you “take a break”, effectively locking Gmail for 15 minutes. Of course, you have to actually hit the button to activate it, so it’s not a complete solution.
It would be great if you could configure OpenDNS to block certain sites based on time. But if you want to block based on usage, perhaps a local machine based tool would be better.
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“No paper involved!”
On a related note, let me pose a question: how much energy / carbon emissions do you save by restricting your student/course interactions on email rather than on print?
At first sight, paper seems to be the bad guy, (imagine chopped trees!!).
However, given that Google would need to archive, replicate and serve the email from spinning hard disks for a long long time, is there a real saving of carbon emissions by communicating to your (local) students by email only?
(Here is a related talk on energy cost of data centers.)
Lesliesays:
You could try setting a crontab that mods your /etc/hosts twice a day–once to enable, once to disable.
I recently turned off the automatic email notification tool in both Outlook and the Google Talk add-on for Gmail. At least this way email is less disruptive with my work flow. However, I’m yet to see whether it causes complications when email arrives that does actually requires immediate response.
On a related point it would be good if there were an email system intelligent enough to know when to notify me immediately and when to leave me alone.
There is a Google labs add-on that lets you “take a break”, effectively locking Gmail for 15 minutes. Of course, you have to actually hit the button to activate it, so it’s not a complete solution.
How about configuring Mail Goggles? It won’t track cumulative time spent, but you could only allow yourself to use Gmail for a few hours a day.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html
Write a shell script that does an ssh redirect on mail.google.com and that kills the redirect after a certain period of time.
It would be great if you could configure OpenDNS to block certain sites based on time. But if you want to block based on usage, perhaps a local machine based tool would be better.
—-
“No paper involved!”
On a related note, let me pose a question: how much energy / carbon emissions do you save by restricting your student/course interactions on email rather than on print?
At first sight, paper seems to be the bad guy, (imagine chopped trees!!).
However, given that Google would need to archive, replicate and serve the email from spinning hard disks for a long long time, is there a real saving of carbon emissions by communicating to your (local) students by email only?
(Here is a related talk on energy cost of data centers.)
You could try setting a crontab that mods your /etc/hosts twice a day–once to enable, once to disable.
I recently turned off the automatic email notification tool in both Outlook and the Google Talk add-on for Gmail. At least this way email is less disruptive with my work flow. However, I’m yet to see whether it causes complications when email arrives that does actually requires immediate response.
On a related point it would be good if there were an email system intelligent enough to know when to notify me immediately and when to leave me alone.
In firefox, you can use LeechBlock addon
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476