Blocking websites again...

Twitter addiction

I just can't shake my Twitter addiction.

Over the past few months, I've used various tools for web blocking. SelfControl, Freedom, my own FocusLite, and others.

At some point, I was running web blocking for 24 hours at a time using SelfControl. That was pretty cool. However, these days I kinda need Twitter, because I'm trying to promote my app FocusTask more. So long blocks won't work.

I tried not blocking at all. But somehow, the habit kept coming back: cmd-T, type t then w and press return. It gets worse when you're tired.

Solution - every 4 hours

With some experimenting I think I found the sweet spot. Allowing myself Twitter (and others) every 4 hours.

Now SelfControl would be perfect for this, but you have to re-start blocking manually after each break. What I needed was more of a inverse SelfControl - where stuff is blocked by default, and you manually start a break.

So voila, I cracked open my older app for blocking and modified code to do just that. I call it MiniBlocker.

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This is my workflow now, and I'm pretty happy with it. It helps me to not go online too often, but also often enough to do something useful there.

And, if I just wanna post Tweets, I'll use Typefully. That one works even if Twitter is blocked.