The New Anti-Social

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an experiment that I conducted on myself. It was a success – though, alas, it was only short-lived.

Withdrawing from social networks like Facebook and Twitter for a fixed 24 hour period was doable for me, but something that I struggled to continue with on a regular basis. Immediately after my experiment, my old habits and patterns resurfaced – and I was once again on the exhausting social network treadmill.

On the desktop, it’s very easy for distractions to take over. It starts innocently enough. You’re stuck in the middle of a project, and you decide to take a peek at Facebook. Two hours later, you’re still on Facebook – with no further progress on your task. For me, social network addiction takes a great deal of effort to control.

So it was a matter of fortunate happenstance that I came across Matt Gemmell’s recent blog post Working in the Shed. Reading it, I started to reflect even more.

I needed a solution.

I didn’t want an all-or-nothing approach, where I eliminate the Internet entirely from my computing habits. Many of my tasks (synching files and folders on Evernote, Wunderlist, DropBox and Copy, respectively) require an Internet connection – and not having one would push back my productivity. And Mac OS X’s parental controls are easy to circumvent when temptation beckons.

Matt’s article pointed out two apps (Freedom and Anti-Social) that work together to keep distractions at bay. I plan on extensively testing both apps during their 90 day evaluation period. I’ll still be on Twitter, Facebook, and the like – but I want a more controlled approach so I can better use my time.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments on the subject.

-Krishna

Krishna August 1, 2013 Mac, productivity, social network addiction, software