If you’re like me, mindless Internet surfing – checking my email and social media sites – has become something of an habitual behavior.
Who am I kidding? It’s not “something of—” It is.
ha·bit·u·al adjective \həˈbiCHo͞oəl\ Done as a habit.
hab·it noun \ˈha-bət\ An acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary.
Yes, I freely admit it. I have an Internet addiction. There, now that I’ve outed myself to whomever you are reading this, I feel much better.
But my addiction is not really that bad. It’s certainly not nearly as all encompassing as Kord Campbell’s, the dude featured in the NY Times article I read yesterday: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?src=tp&smid=fb-share
Kord is truly an addict – no offense intended – but this guy makes my puny Internet addiction look irrelevant by comparison. You see my addiction (now that I’ve let the cat out of the bag I can’t seem to stop saying it) doesn’t involve games or an iPhone. I don’t even own an iPhone for precisely the same reason I don’t have an Internet plan on my iPad, because I don’t want to be held hostage to an electronic device.
For as long as I can remember I have been obsessed with productivity. Even as a child I was aware of the passage of time and the feeling like there just weren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things I wanted to. Maybe because I wanted to be a dancer, and as everyone knows a professional dancer’s career is fleeting – if you want to be a one you have to start when you’re young. In any case, this sensation of the importance of utilizing my time efficiently has only increased with age. Magnify it with the scheduling complications that adding a spouse and children to your life brings and what was once a mild obsession becomes even greater.
Enter the Internet. A wonderful tool for work – I use it constantly for research – and an even more wonderful way to stay in touch with family and friends – yet an insidious time suck that threatens to take away the precious moments of not only my life but the memories I have of my family and friends as well. Sounds dramatic I know, but if you really think about it, it’s true, isn’t it? I mean we can rationalize all we want about how great technology has made our lives – and don’t get me wrong it has – I am in love with internet streaming on my TV – but do I really want to remember my children’s childhood as the time I sat nosed into my glowing computer reading Huffington Post or, God forbid, Deadline.com?
During one of my recent late night web surfs I decided to investigate how computer scientists deal with productivity. Don’t ask me why, I just had a hunch that the guy’s who are bringing us this wonderful technology might have some cool tips for us greenhorns. Well, I was right. I found a terrific site: Study Hacks – http://calnewport.com/blog/ created by Cal Newport a former MIT computer science PhD candidate and now professor at Georgetown, whose blog is devoted to decoding underlying patterns of success. I love, love, love this guy. He has so many great tips for maximizing human potential. Once I started reading his blogs, I couldn’t stop – talk about a time suck. But one thing he mentioned that stuck with me that night and into the next day was an app called Freedom – http://macfreedom.com/, that apparently locks you away from the internet for up to eight hours at a time. I checked the site and was intrigued by the testimonials I read from such writers as Nora Ephron, Nick Hornsby, Dave Eggers, and Seth Godin (a virtual God of marketing). Days went by and I did nothing about it, still the thought of installing the program lurked in the back of my mind.
Cut to a few days ago. I decided to do a global search to see if there were other websites that blocked the internet that were equally as compelling as Freedom. Guess what? There are. Plenty. Not only is there Freedom, but there’s Vitamin Space – http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/, Concentrate – http://getconcentrating.com/, RescueTime – http://www.rescuetime.com/, and FlexTime – http://www.red-sweater.com/flextime/ – to name just a few. There’s also a free site called SelfControl -- http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/. After some deliberation, I decided to download SelfControl and try it, because A) I liked the name and B) I liked the price – free. And C) when I read about the artist, Steve Lambert, who had a programmer create the site to help him focus, I liked it even more. I also liked the fact that you could black list the sites you want to block. When I’m writing I sometimes need to do a quick fact check, so blocking the Internet completely doesn’t make sense at the moment. Maybe someday it will…
Well, I'm happy to report yesterday I installed it and gave it a 2-hour test run. Once launched, I felt a surge of relief just knowing I wouldn’t be able to access my favorite time suck websites. Before I knew it 2 hours had passed and I had written non-stop. Today I ran the application for 6 hours and was amazed as the time flew by. When it was over and the little ding chimed (another feature I love btw), I immediately went to my favorite sites to see what I had missed in my 6-hour absence. You know what I found out? I hadn’t missed a thing – nothing that couldn’t wait 6 hours anyway.
Does this signal a new wave of productivity for me and greater degree of focused, quality time with my family? If today’s output is any indication, I am extremely optimistic.
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