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Forcing time offline gives you freedom
By Rosie Perera | June 25, 2010 at 1:20 am
Ever have a day like this?
I find it happening more and more often. It can be an addiction, an obsession, a compulsion, an enslavement to the need to check for one more new message, follow one more rabbit trail, play one more move in Scrabble, find out one more factoid, write one more blog post, before getting down to work.
I’ve recently learned of a useful tool called Freedom which blocks the Internet for a set period of time that you specify in minutes (up to 8 hours). It works pretty well. It blocks all Internet access: that includes email, websites, automatic software updates, etc. The program will not let you cancel it, so you’re pretty much stuck until the time is up. Even killing the process doesn’t restore Internet access. The only way around it is to reboot your computer, but that’s enough of an impediment to keep the distractions at bay while you get some work done. My only critique is I wish it were more flexible about input format for times: allowing longer time periods (up to 24 hours) and allowing time formats like 8:30 for 8 hours and 30 minutes, rather than making you do the math in your head (let’s see, how many minutes are there in 7 and a half hours?).
Despite the domain name, it runs on both Mac and Windows: http://macfreedom.com
Sometimes having all the freedom in the world to roam about online is actually more of a bondage. It breeds indecisiveness if you’re researching something — too much information! It opens you up to distractions. Just as submitting to Christ’s lordship brings freedom (John 8:36, “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”), so voluntarily limiting your infinite access to cyberspace for a time can bring relief from tyranny.
OK, one more blog post done. Now back to real work. (But this is my real work! Part of it, anyway.)
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