SiteCop is a productivity management Chrome extension made to protect you from those websites that make you waste your time on them. If you are a person who just can’t resist yourself from checking some news feeds or videos at the wrong time, this extension helps you cut down on such distractions by blocking or limiting access to them, all according to your commands.
Once you install the extension on your browser, a small icon appears on the left side of the address bar. Clicking on the icon will give you access to SiteCop’s three timer or blocker features.
It features three different option-rich timed lists to block websites and a bonus Pomodoro option. On each one of these lists, you can add multiple URLs that you want to block or limit access to. You can also block words that appear in web addresses, for instance, add words like ‘politics,’ ‘cricket,’ ‘shopping’ etc. You also have the choice of choosing the days you want the websites to be blocked. You can also choose the maximum number of minutes per day you are allowed to access the websites, and even create custom ranges using sliders given right below the ‘Maximum minutes per day’ tab option.
The Whitelist tab lets you select websites that will never be blocked. This is useful for allowing only a subsection of a website that you have on one of the lists of blocked websites, or perhaps your email account hosted on a website that you would otherwise block. You may want to be quite specific with your Whitelist website addresses.
The Pomodoro tab lets you:
- Decide on the task to be done.
- Set the pomodoro timer (set to 25 minutes by default).
- Work on the task until the timer ends, then take a short rest (3-5 minutes).
- After four pomodoros, take a longer break (15–30 minutes) then go to step.
Input the minutes of work, rest, and the number of cycles in pomodoro. The optional bell will ring at the end of every work cycle.
SiteCop is going to be a useful extension for those who are easily distracted of random websites, at work. Try it out and let us know what you think.
I’m always surprised that the available pomodoro apps don’t support the “unplanned & urgent” sheet which is almost the most important part of the pomodoro.
It’s not only that “work for 25 min and take 5 min break after”, but handle the interruptions by writing the interrupts down on the unplanned and urgent sheet.
Since I haven’t found any apps so far supporting this feature, I created a serverless pomodoro app for this. http://pomodoro.wooh.hu/
Also I don’t quite get why “blocking” sites are useful. If you can’t limit yourself during that 25 min… than these plugins won”t stop you from opening up an anonymous window if you really need to look at those sites. What’s more after the 25 minute pomodoro, you should be able to visit those sites during that 5 – 25 min break.