Quick One...sort of

I know, I owe lots of pictures and stuff but I am on a mission to not be my usual, great-intention-crummy-follow-through self. Any of you who know me well know what I mean. You look at me fondly and shake your head and smile wryly because you know the Frau gets crazy excited about certain things, does them for a while, and then puts them in a corner to collect dust, either literally or figuratively.

I'm not this way about everything, but it's one of my least favorite qualities about myself, and I'm trying not to be that way because it frustrates me AND my husband and probably others. The rain barrel I bought? Fills up and overflows because I don't use it for the garden I never put together last summer...although I have hope that if we plant it closer to the house this year, I won't need 200ft of hose to even use the dumb rain barrel. Efforts to green up my life? Meh, some stayed, some didn't. Elliptical machine upstairs so I'd use it more? Classic clothes rack.

One of my other qualities is to dump all over myself about bad habits, so I won't go on; I wanted this to be more of a recognition of my faults in an attempt to heighten awareness. For example, I got half my thank-you notes from my beautiful baby shower done IMMEDIATELY and I'm almost done with the rest. But if I don't finish them this week, well.... But I KNOW this. So that helps.

Anyway, I really wanted to write this because I read an article about procrastination this morning in Real Simple and it suggested a great way to avoid the "I'll just surf the Net for ten minutes" joke that turns into hours of wasted time: A free add-on called LeechBlock for Firefox. It allows you to list the sites you waste the most time on them, and it literally blocks them for whatever amount of time you specify. For example, I blocked Blogger (and Facebook, Gmail, Slate.com....) this morning so I could get projects graded from 9-1pm. Even the sheer act of doing this caused me to focus better. There's also Rescue Time, a site that tracks what you actually do on the Internet and then graphs where and how you spend your time--an eye-opener that can show you just how long you spend and how often you go to certain sites.

On that note, I'm getting off Blogger and making myself a well-earned grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and then continuing to grade on the newly restored back porch, where no evil technology can lure me away. Hooray for spring!