Assumed audience: Other people interested in stewarding their time well, most especially by cutting out the distractions of social media and chat.
I spent a good chunk of my morning working through diffs between the latest NoStarch print copy of The Rust Programming Language and the version we have in the repo for the book. This is, to say the least, not an interesting or engaging task. Generally speaking, when I am deeply enmeshed in something interesting, I have little trouble staying “on task” to make progress on it. With something this dull and boring, though, the temptation to open Slack or Discord or some public social media app can be nearly overwhelming.
This is one huge reason not to be on social media if you can avoid it! I have reason to be on social media, though, so I need other ways to keep myself on track. “Just be disciplined,” I have found, works well only when it works well — which is to say: it fails precisely in the times I need it most.
Many years ago, I came across Freedom, a handy app for blocking distractions. I can block apps on macOS and iOS (they have Android, ChromeOS, and Windows support as well, but I don’t use any of those), and block both individual and whole categories of websites. I can set up recurring sessions that block different chunks at different times, or spin up a new dedicated session on demand.
I have recurring sessions that span most of my working time most days. Here’s what my block-or-not schedule currently looks like:
00:00 – 10:00 - All chat apps (Slack, Discord, etc.) and all social media are entirely blocked. That way those easy distractions are unavailable during those key first hours of the day. I have considered including email in the list.
10:00 – 10:30 - Everything is unblocked, providing a morning break where I can hop on chat or social media and catch up on any conversations that are important to me.
10:30 – 12:30 - Everything is blocked again.
12:30 – 13:00 - Another break.
13:00 – 14:30 - Social media is blocked, but chat apps are not. I am usually able to keep engaged in my work fairly well in the afternoons, and also have a much lower-productivity window here anyway. Net, I find that I do better by leaving myself some flexibility in this window.
14:30 – 15:00 - Another break.
15:00 – 17:00 - The same as the first afternoon stretch: social media is blocked, chat is not.
17:00 – 20:00 - Nothing is blocked, but I am also mostly engaged with family in this time. I do fairly little social media or chat here.
20:00 – 00:00 - Everything is blocked, so I do not waste the evenings.
There is plenty of time in there where I can interact with the digital social communities that I am part of on Slack, Discord, Bluesky, etc., but there is much more time where those distractions are not available to me.
What is more, the days where I accidentally do not have this running — for example, because I had to (or chose to!) shut down Freedom on some previous day — I often end up spending far more time distracted by chat and social media than I ever want to. A few days last week, for example, I ended up spending a lot of time bouncing between work and chat conversations, and while I still got my work done, it was far less effective a use of that time than it would have been had I kept my head down and focused.
This is not perfect, of course. I am perfectly capable of disabling Freedom anytime I want, even in its locked mode (I am the boss of this computer!). The annoyance of jumping through extra hoops to do so makes it easier not to given into that temptation simply because I am bored, though, and to do it only when it actually makes sense for some reason or another.
Just to be extra clear: I have no relationship with Freedom other than as a happy customer who bought their lifetime unlock long ago. It is also not the only tool like it — I have lately enjoyed Raycast’s built-in focus tool, too — but it is one that works well for me. If good focus is something you struggle with, I commend it to you!