July 26, 2010

Is “work flow” an oxymoron for you? On many days it is for me. The first thing that I do in the morning is check Twitter and then email. Both inevitably cause me to click on links to websites, and before you know it, an hour goes by.

If this happened only in the morning, I’d be productive enough, but the process repeats every time I’m away from my computer during the day. In other words, the first thing that I do after any absence is check Twitter and email—and another hour goes by.

During the summer, I get even less work done because my kids are at home, and they’re always dropping into my home office. Luckily, I don’t check Facebook on a daily basis, and no one sends me text messages, or things would be worse.

Sure, I’ve read the advice of lifehackers and GTDers who tell you how to do the important things first and to create various systems. But I’m too weak. For a while I thought that I’d never finish my next book.

Does any of this sound familiar? If it does, I recently found two applications that have helped me. First, Freedom by Fred Stuzman. It turns off Internet access for your computer for up to eight hours. There is a way to override it—restarting your computer—but doing this is a total admission of weakness. It sells for $10, Macintosh and Windows.

Second, Fred also created a program called Anti-Social. It enables you to block access to specific sites and their APIs for up to eight hours too—for example, http://twitter.com/ and api.twitter.com. This means that you can’t access Twitter via the Twitter website nor Twitter clients like Tweetdeck that use the Twitter API. The complete list of sites that it can block includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Hulu and YouTube.

Anti-Social is for people who need access to email and websites for work purposes and, say, Pandora, for music but cannot handle unrestricted access to everything. Like Freedom, you can override it by restarting your Macintosh. It sells for $15 (or $20 for both Freedom and Anti-Social), Macintosh only.

Join the conversation ( 2 )

• Faisal Faruqi 1 year 5 months and 26 days ago

  

  Excellent post guy. For me it all depends upon the task at hand. If I'm working on my book I usually disconnect my machine from the net.
  
  I don't check my email in the morning and take start from the most important task at hand. It may be creative writing or even google reader.
  
  I'm not perfect and it seems I need Anti-Social to block youtube access to which I'm almost addicted
  
  Thanks.

• Thursday Bram 1 year 6 months and 5 days ago

  

  I've had similar problems over the years -- I used to resort to unplugging my computer from the internet in order to keep myself focused. The problem that I run into is that some of the online tools I need in order to do my work can quickly turn into time-sucks (like my email).
  
  My approach has been to use a timer. Whenever the timer goes off, I have a reminder to get back to whatever I'm actually supposed to be working on.