Reading about the history of some country that I’ve never read about before is an easy three hours. ↩︎
I also don’t read fiction anymore because I just won’t sleep until the book is over. Should I be embarrassed to admit that I read the entire ASOIAF (Game of Thrones) series in less than a week in 2010? I do still listen to fiction audiobooks, but even that can be a bit risky and I mostly reserve it for vacations or to listen to while I do some big home repair project. ↩︎
At one point, Liz went even further than me and completely blocked the internet on her personal laptop unless I explicitly enabled it. Her laptop was not connected to our wifi and only I had the wifi password. So, when she needed to use the internet on her laptop, I went into our router settings and activated a guest wifi network for her. The guest wifi was then active for three hours. Note that she did have a separate work laptop and these wifi blocks only applied to her personal laptop. ↩︎
Actually working at the times that you plan to work is orthogonal to the question of how much you work. ↩︎
My “tablet” is effectively a second laptop because it has a fold-out keyboard and trackpad. This has been important for getting this system to work. Otherwise, I would drift back to using my laptop for non-work tasks that require a lot of typing. I think having a second laptop would be less effective because iPadOS is much easier to irreversibly lock down than a laptop. Also doing a lot of work tasks (coding!) is unpleasant on a tablet so this firms up the work vs not-work separation. ↩︎
I get sleepy at 3pm all the time… ↩︎
The Pro version currently costs $39 but it’s worth like 1000x more than that to me. None of the other blocker apps are at the level of Cold Turkey. If you use something else and like it more, let me know! ↩︎
I would’ve loved to share the contents of all my block lists here, but that would be akin to sharing my entire search history. It’s private! If you want the contents of the whitelist, I am more willing to share that because it’s only work-related websites. Feel free to email and ask. ↩︎
I chose 2am for the stop time so that I have some leeway to wake up early instead of unblocking. Suppose I need to get something done by 7am and it’s not done by 9:15 pm. I can either unblock a device or I can just wake up early. On the flip side, 2am is late enough that I won’t stay up in order to wait out the block. If I had chosen 11pm or 12am, that might’ve been an issue. ↩︎
In grad school, I got most of my best work done between 10pm and 5am. How I “fixed” this deserves its own post. These days, I’m most productive in the morning. But, I still sometimes stay up late working when I don’t have anything important in the morning and I’m motivated. ↩︎
There are work-related talks on YouTube that I might want to watch but normally I can just substitute by reading the corresponding research paper. I'm not a big fan of watching talks anyway. ↩︎
Reddit is incredibly useful for getting opinions. I’m one of those people that appends “reddit” to the end of lots of Google searches. ↩︎
Computers are awesome. Also computers really suck… the time out of my day. The same goes for phones and tablets and anything that can access the internet. I've been addicted to way too many different internet activities: Reddit, TV, Instagram, Twitter, Hackernews, product reviews, travel blogs, tech blogs, the EA forum, etc, etc, etc. Even Wikipedia can be a huge time sink for me![1] Maybe I have less self control or less willpower than others?[2] Regardless, my internet time wasting got pretty bad over the years. Working from home during the pandemic finally set me off a cliff where I realized I really needed to solve the problem.
“Every advance in productivity afforded by technology has been quickly swallowed by a corresponding reduction in the barriers to procrastination.”
So, in late 2020, I started putting together a system of blocks that make my computer and phone helpful rather than destructive. I wasn’t successful immediately. I’ve made many little tweaks in that time and patched up gaps and cracks. But, the result is a system that solves most of my internet addiction problems without completely disabling my devices![3] Over time, the urge to do addictive things online has also faded a lot, but I have no plans to loosen the controls.
Blocking
The flowchart above describes the algorithm for my blocks. The basic principles are:
In painstaking detail:
Appendix
Implementation details that I left out above:
Technical problems that I’d love a solution for:
<!-- Footnotes themselves at the bottom. -->
Notes
Reading about the history of some country that I’ve never read about before is an easy three hours. ↩︎
I also don’t read fiction anymore because I just won’t sleep until the book is over. Should I be embarrassed to admit that I read the entire ASOIAF (Game of Thrones) series in less than a week in 2010? I do still listen to fiction audiobooks, but even that can be a bit risky and I mostly reserve it for vacations or to listen to while I do some big home repair project. ↩︎
At one point, Liz went even further than me and completely blocked the internet on her personal laptop unless I explicitly enabled it. Her laptop was not connected to our wifi and only I had the wifi password. So, when she needed to use the internet on her laptop, I went into our router settings and activated a guest wifi network for her. The guest wifi was then active for three hours. Note that she did have a separate work laptop and these wifi blocks only applied to her personal laptop. ↩︎
Actually working at the times that you plan to work is orthogonal to the question of how much you work. ↩︎
My “tablet” is effectively a second laptop because it has a fold-out keyboard and trackpad. This has been important for getting this system to work. Otherwise, I would drift back to using my laptop for non-work tasks that require a lot of typing. I think having a second laptop would be less effective because iPadOS is much easier to irreversibly lock down than a laptop. Also doing a lot of work tasks (coding!) is unpleasant on a tablet so this firms up the work vs not-work separation. ↩︎
I get sleepy at 3pm all the time… ↩︎
The Pro version currently costs $39 but it’s worth like 1000x more than that to me. None of the other blocker apps are at the level of Cold Turkey. If you use something else and like it more, let me know! ↩︎
I would’ve loved to share the contents of all my block lists here, but that would be akin to sharing my entire search history. It’s private! If you want the contents of the whitelist, I am more willing to share that because it’s only work-related websites. Feel free to email and ask. ↩︎
I chose 2am for the stop time so that I have some leeway to wake up early instead of unblocking. Suppose I need to get something done by 7am and it’s not done by 9:15 pm. I can either unblock a device or I can just wake up early. On the flip side, 2am is late enough that I won’t stay up in order to wait out the block. If I had chosen 11pm or 12am, that might’ve been an issue. ↩︎
In grad school, I got most of my best work done between 10pm and 5am. How I “fixed” this deserves its own post. These days, I’m most productive in the morning. But, I still sometimes stay up late working when I don’t have anything important in the morning and I’m motivated. ↩︎
There are work-related talks on YouTube that I might want to watch but normally I can just substitute by reading the corresponding research paper. I'm not a big fan of watching talks anyway. ↩︎
Reddit is incredibly useful for getting opinions. I’m one of those people that appends “reddit” to the end of lots of Google searches. ↩︎