Web Spy: KeepMeOut

By Laura Dondero

[There are over 100 million sites on the Internet. 100 million! You might think you know about all the important ones (CollegeCandy, Gmail, Google, TFLN…), but there are thousands of other sweet sites out there (like Hot List, Wake Up Dialer, and College Bar Finder) and more showing up every day! We get it – it’s not easy or fun sifting through the crap and porn to find those gems, so we’re gonna bring the gems to you. Just sit back, kick up those feet and allow us to introduce you to the diamonds in the internet rough.]

Does this scenario sound familiar to you?  You have a 20-page research paper due in just a few days, and you haven’t even started it yet.  You can’t help it, there’s just too much going on in your life!  Between the frat party, roommate dinner, and football game you attended over the weekend, there just wasn’t any time.  And tonight’s Pint Night… and tomorrow your favorite show is on.  You keep telling yourself you have to get started on it, but every time you sit down at your desk and open your laptop, you keep getting distracted.  I’m sure it does–college students are masters of the art of procrastination.

I’m just as guilty as the rest of you when it comes to procrastinating — I don’t think I’ve ever started a paper more than a day or two before it was due — but it’s definitely a habit I’d like to break.  Eventually.

KeepMeOut is the first step towards helping you kick your procrastination habit.  It’s simple: all you do is type the address of a website you visit too often and how often you want to be reminded to stay off of it (for example, visiting Facebook more than once an hour).  Then, replace your existing bookmark for the site with the new link KeepMeOut provides you with.  From now on, every time you try to access that site more often than the interval you chose, you’ll get a message from KeepMeOut instead, telling you to wait another 59 minutes until trying to log on again.

Sure, it’s annoying at first not to be able to constantly check on your crush’s status updates, but it pretty much forces you to do something else with your time instead–like get started on that paper!  Right after you finish watching that YouTube video your roommate sent you, of course.