Locking Down The Internet

Or, A Tale Of The Encroaching Leechblock

(Please note; Big blog post coming tomorrow on making unlimited money. I’m not joking. It was today’s intended post, but it’s going a lot longer than I thought. Today’s post is a short one and a bit of an improvised one.)

At the beginning of the year, I was determined to become more productive. I wrote it as the heuristic, “Get More Life Out Of Life,” and am halfway through a bunch of essays on things like automation, Vril/Odic Force, passive income and so forth. Because humans aren’t machines and “increasing productivity” sounds mightily like humans are considered an industrial unit.

Like a washing machine.

We’re not, even though both capitalists and communists and every major political and economic philosophy of note since the Industrial Revolution began seems to treat us so.

I digress.

“Get more life out of life” is a little mantra though that’s useful in the current attention-apocalypse.

Productivity for the sake of sacrificing for the Lovecraftian Entity We Call “The Economy”: not good.

Working out the Black Hat Life Hacks so that you have more time and energy to do the things you actually want to do with your time on Earth? (And possibly beyond it…): far better.

I’ll no-doubt compile a list of these in full essay form at some point, (harking back to the recent post about adding value to your blog posts through a neat IP trick,) but for now, here’s an interesting little experience.

We’re Nearly All Guilty Of One Life Stealer

We’re nearly all guilty of one life-stealing habit nowadays; and that’s scrolling our phones, computers, tablets and other devices excessively. As I write this, I believe based on social media hulabaloo that Apple have just released their VR goggles, which threaten to turn more people into more zombie-like drones.

Of course, the answer in a lot of cases is to simply walk away from the screen. For me, in 2024 thus far, I’ve spent less than an hour every day on the phone. I leave it upstairs in the mornings, at night and for the most part, during the day I’m at the computer and I don’t touch it. (The goal is sub-30 minutes but that’s hard with 2FA and using the camera on my phone – but those are things to address later.)

Still, I spend an inordinate amount of time browsing on the computer, and it’s not as easy as simply not being at the computer, what with running a publishing company and being a writer. While the mentor-types I have suggest using two computers; one online, one offline, I’ve found that impractical due to updates, needing to put things from one to the other, uploading bits and pieces, and so on…

That’s where Leechblock comes in.

Using Leechblock…

Every Sunday, I do a weekly review. It’s an informal thing, but I write how I’m doing with the various goals I have. One of them, the “Get More Life Out Of Life” and “productivity” goal, has, since the start, involved Leechblock.

At first I set it to kill social media and news sites that I get nothing out of. There were a handful, that I now can’t access during working hours. That was fine.Except I had to widen that out; I had Twitter unblocked because I might need to tweet stuff. That’s not the case. Then I had Reddit because I tend to find it decent for asking questions and getting answers. But that leads to the dark side of scrolling.

As of Week 2 of February, I’m just locking everything down until 5pm. I usually work until 6pm, so that gives me an hour to email, upload, social media if needs-be, and so on.

And I think I’ll probably go further; I can already feel things like having Macro scripts for uploading everything might be better.

Anyway, it’s food for thought. Thought you won’t have if you’re doomscrolling Twitter or endlessly flicking through social stories.