http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114401
I've certainly started visiting Programming Reddit more since visiting news.YC less. OTOH, I don't think it makes up for the full difference, and my startup has gotten the balance of that time. That could be because the startup is more mature and hence more fun to work on now, though.
I had the crazy idea (since my startup is all about casual games) that instead of blocking people from playing games all day, you should just turn their daily work into a game. Carrot, instead of stick. Don't really know how the specifics would work, but it's something I'd like to play with as our game-creation software gets more mature.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143...
about using games to get people to do useful computation
Isn't that the whole point of RescueTime and 8aweek? Although I admit that the game is probably less fun if your boss is grading the high-score table.
Eventually it settled in that I couldn't go there, and I haven't wasted time on there since. Its a great feeling and I get way more done.
Editing the host file was a pain though, and was a cold-turkey cutoff. That's where the idea for 8aweek came. We want everyone to be able to control their bad habits, but in a nice feature rich app, and not some hack in your system's files.
Hope you try it out. Let us know if it worked for you and what would help.
Dunno about others, but I tend to go from one form of procrastination to another.