2011 could be the year we all discover freedom.
It's been written about in the FT, the Economist and the New York Times. Authors like Nick Hornby and Dave Eggers swear by it. Some claim their productivity has shot up by 300% because of it. Others are just thrilled to have got their lives back.
The man they all want to thank is called Fred Stutzman, and he's set to be the next hero of the digital age. He's the man who created a simple productivity application for your computer, called Freedom. It costs $10, and it does one little thing: it disconnects you from the Internet for up to eight hours at a time. You decide how long, it does the rest.
It sounds ridiculous. Surely we can all manage our own time, and discipline ourselves to keep away from distractions while we get on with whatever we have to do?
You can try. But first, answer these questions:
- have you ever watched just one thing on YouTube?
- have you ever had a random thought float into your head, and Googled it?
- once you've opened your email program, do you close it when you've read or dealt with the unread messages?
- if you leave it on, and you can see the number of unread emails in your inbox, at what point do you feel compelled to check them?
Everyone procrastinates. Everyone gets distracted. You can pretend not to, but you'd be lying. You can heroically claim to be multi-tasking - but did you know that this can effectively lower your IQ by 10 points and your productivity by 20 - 40%? Which is worse, by the way, than the effect of smoking a joint.
I can give you references for those statistics, but you'd just click off after them and float around the Internet for a happy but useless hour or so.
Victor Hugo used to write naked, and made his valet hide his clothes so he couldn't go out and avoid the task in hand. That won't solve our problems. An office full of naked people would possibly distract us from the web, but it probably wouldn't increase productivity (apart from maybe in one way).
So here's the only link I'm going to give you: http://macfreedom.com/
Off you go. See you in an hour or so.
Paul Kitcatt
Chief Creative Officer
Comments
04 January 11
By: Angus
The 'own-time web'
This is the app for me. I think 'Freedom' might be the poster boy for an emerging trend in 2011- the 'own-time web'. We're at a point now where we have all the information we could ever want, wherever we are and served to us as fast as we could ever need it. What we need now is the ability to filter and manage it all- to deal with information on our own terms.
Check out Adkeeper (http://www.adkeeper.com/) - a new startup that allows people to 'keep' online ads to read later. A great example of a piece of functionality that tries to beat our culture of interruption.
04 January 11
By: Phil Keevill
24 hour delay
Brilliant, Paul. i'd like to see an email program that deliberately delayed the sending of your emails by 24 hours. That way, if something really needed someone's attention, you'd have to pick up the phone and "talk" to them. or better still, get up off your behind and "see"AND "talk" to them. Phil
04 February 11
By: Lazar
No use to me.
I prefer to use the good old will power. Call me old-fashioned. Not everything could be replaced with an app. If it can, we are doomed.