Let’s face it, there are times in life when you sit at your computer to get something done and immediately know it’s not going to happen. When I come to such a mental roadblock, I find it’s best to just sacrifice an hour to the procrastination gods and then get back to work. There are thousands of ways to kill time on the internet – some more productive than others. So if knocking down Bloons levels just isn’t bringing you a sense of accomplishment, here are five online time-killers that will leave you feeling rewarded even after you close your browser.

1. Play Freerice

FreeRice.com is a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program. This is my personal favorite because it hits productivity on two levels. It’s essentially a vocab challenge that donates rice to the needy with every question you get right. On one level it enhances your vocabulary, and on the second, it feeds hungry people all over the world. “Yea Dave? You got the new helicopter high score? I helped stop world hunger. See you at the meeting.”

2. Get Familiar with the World

There are 195 countries in the world. Unfortunately there are way too many Americans who don’t know how to find more than 5. The next time you have a moment to goof-off, spend it brushing up on your geography skills. Online geography quizzes like Traveler IQ Challenge and Sheppard Software will fill in that mental map in no time, and Geosense will actually pit you against other online players for added motivation. You can also download Seterra Geography Tutor for free if you don’t mind losing an extra 800 KBs on your hard drive.

3. Watch A Documentary

There are loads of free and informative documentaries to watch online. Some of them tend to run long so those are best for long-term procrastination. Even if you only watch for a couple minutes it’s rare that you won’t actually learn something. Freedocumentaries.net has plenty of good stuff organized by topic and rated by users and Documentary-Log has some good quickies. Check out this star size comparison if you’re in the mood for an overwhelming feeling of insignificance.

4. Learn How to Do Something

With sites like eHow and wikiHow you can learn everything from Photoshop to ice sculpting. Like Wikipedia (see next on the list), wikiHow allows open contributions, so it can be a bit less professional but way more hilarious. My new favorite is How to Be Weird but you can find a guide to do just about anything.

5. Contribute to Wikipedia

It’s everyone’s favorite free online encyclopedia, and it got that way because people contributed when they had nothing better to do. That’s my theory, anyway. At this point the content on Wikipedia is so rich that boredom couldn’t have been the only motivation – but I bet it was part of it. The next time you don’t want to work, but want to feel a sense of productivity, consider the topics you have the most experience with or know the most about. Maybe you’re really into digital photography. Contribute to a Wikipedia article, and sit back knowing that your knowledge is now a resource for the world. Dave and his high score must be feeling pretty frivolous about now.

Got your own productive way to cure boredom? Let us know in the comments.