How to force yourself to leave the computer using the leave command(stefanjudis.com) |
How to force yourself to leave the computer using the leave command(stefanjudis.com) |
There's a simple solution that has been working well for me for years: have 2 local accounts on the machine, with everything separated, even different visual themes (like, bright for personal time, grey for professional time), and a different base color, e.g. blue and green.
On principle the pro account has no login on any of the websites where I have a personal account and vice versa. Same for e-mails.
That way, when on the pro account, no personal notification, only professional stuff, and vice versa. Has been helping me being concentrating on pro stuff for the last 4 years.
To be precise, the separation is not totally strict, but it does not have to be 100% to be effective. Visual theme and only relevant notifications make a big part of the benefit.
But for when I still had family and kids this set-up would be not strict enough. Now with WFO everyone is a "freelancer" and work time bleeds into private time. Here is the only thing that worked for me.
1) hardware separation: My private laptop is upstairs, no access to my work world. My work laptop is chained to my work desk.
2) my work desk is in my office
3) my office is downstairs
it has taken me some decades to refine that because initially I was sitting in the living room coding while also attending to my toddler kids. later I started hiding away in the "study" which was in the same flat but another room and I was still reachable to whenever my partner felt like popping in with a questions such as "what do you want for dinner dear?" or "do you think my black shoes go with my grey shirt", etc. After moving I hid away downstairs. In the past years I made sure there is 100% hardware compartmentalization in all my gear, and ideally that also includes modifications to location.
Finally I have managed to train my surrounding so that they no longer ask why I didn't bring a phone. To which I usually respond, so that I can be here in the moment. I don't judge others for doing it but when I sit down for a cup of coffee with anyone or am in a meeting, I would never disrespect them by browsing on my phone while pretending to listen to them.
Even more extreme my partner has stopped sending me updates on messenger because they know I prefer talking about what happened in person, and I do not want to dilute the moment. I've gone from burnt out, unfocused and distracted to in-the-moment, hyperfocused and it had a huge effect on how people treat me and how I remember things (most importantly I am able to form long term memories which multi-tasking has killed).
So it's not a perfect solution, but overall it's worth the effort.
Macports does things in a more conventional way, requiring sudo to elevate privileges to root before installing software, but should also work properly on a multi-user system, whereas homebrew sort of assumes a single-user install.
(I think homebrew has some capacity for being used multi-user -- years back my CS professor had a lab of macs and managed to get this working I believe)
It doesn't take too much separation to break bad habits, but it does take some care to maintain the separation.
I can't tell you what a relief it would be to have little choice but to focus on work tasks instead of get distracted.
Sure, I would need to have the key to the lock in case I really needed it, but it would need to be something mildly time consuming, like answering a set of relatively simple math problems that would still take a few minutes to do them all even with a calculator, to stop casual alt-tab to random distractions.
echo "notify-send 'Tea is ready'" | at 15:30
I too wanted something like that, must solve an equation or something, but this is close enough.
Ever since the rise of the attention economy I've felt more and more disillusioned with the way the internet of information has evolved. With each of us being a commodity and companies creating content that was more likely to keep us looking at the page (and ergo ads) with content that was increasingly more divisive.
Any tool that helps us remove pages from our consumption that are designed to keep us engaged in that horrendous economy is simply a must have.
Thank you.
For people that want to get locked into one app for set period of time (or a few apps, in the pro version), check out Micromanager: https://getcoldturkey.com/micromanager/
Edit: Just checked it out, yes, yes yes exactly what I need. Even let's you set an "unlock" to be a certain length of random text, which suits my needs to find something sufficiently annoying to have to do in order to break the lock.
I REALLY cannot thank you enough. +1000 upvotes.
Sometimes I weaken and uncomment then all and binge for a bit. But for some reason it works better for me than just trying not to go to those websites.
alias brew='sudo -u personalaccount brew'
It's just so fragrantly violating the Unix model.
Micromanager looks interesting, though the advanced features of Cold Turkey Pro kind of let me do the same thing. But stripping off bits of features into less expensive stand alone apps seems a good idea for people that have specific needs instead of my more systemic attention issues at the moment... homeschooling kids while WFH is hard, switching back & forth without letting more distractions side track me is harder than I'd anticipated.
And if you had something for phones that did this, I'd buy that too... for now I'm just leaving my phone in another room. Low-tech & free!