Two completely addicting websites that will help your career skills — and one that will get you fired

If you can type 200 words per minute and got 800 on your Verbal SAT, then you probably don't need to visit these websites.

I tweeted something about time sucks and got a link from the author of Freelancedom with a list of her favorite time-wasters.  There are literally an infinite number of ways to waste time and the ones she posted are especially effective at that.

I checked them all out because she was so kind to inflict them on me, and two of them my wife and I return to because they build two pretty critical skills: vocabulary and typing speed.

A broader and more precise vocabulary is useful just about anywhere.  The mechanics of FreeRice.com are simple: answer a multiple-choice vocabulary question and you trigger a donation of 20 grains of rice to people who need it through the United Nations World Food Program.  Of course there are more efficient ways to donate rice than using this website; there are about 30,000 grains of rice in a pound, which means that one must answer 1,500 vocabulary questions correctly to donate less than $1.00 worth of rice.  But the vocabulary quizzing is excellent by itself.  The more you get right, the harder the words get.  There are settings that let you revisit words that you miss, or start at a more challenging level.  My wife hovers around at a vocab level in the mid-50s and I'm in the mid-40s.  This is a fun way to learn new words.

For writers, coders, managers, students, and anyone else who needs to type a lot of stuff, TypeRacer.com turns touch typing into an addictive drag-race competition.  Practice alone or compete against other random users or even your friends to type a quotation from a book, song, or movie the fastest.  It makes you go back and fix your mistakes, and keeps track of how many words per minute you type.  My wife beats me on this one, too: I can type in the high 50s now and my wife manages in the high 60s or low 70s most times.

I don't recommend using these sites at work.  I do recommend them as good diversions, especially when compared to another highly-addicting time waster called Throw Paper.  A site that has a guy falling asleep in a meeting on the welcome screen just can't be good for your career!

Any other addicting, career-building sites that you've run across?