A few weeks ago I tweeted out that I had (re)discovered the Freedom app, and that it had allowed me to do a tremendous amount of work in the span of a few days.
If you are not familiar with it, Freedom allows blocking off distractions on your computer, phone, or tablet–or any combination of those things at once.
After reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work when it came out in 2016, I had used Freedom for a time. Back then, however, it was an all-or-nothing proposition: You either blocked off your Internet altogether, or you did not. But for a lot of what I do, I need to be able to access things like Overleaf, Google Scholar, and various other web resources,* so that a blanket ban on any and all apps and websites ended up being counterproductive.
Enter the new and improved Freedom, which allows to select what you block off for a designated amount of time. In my case, my most common distractions are Twitter, email, and news sites, so that is what I block off. The beauty of Freedom is that you can call up a session that blocks off all those things on more than one device. In my case, that would be my computer and my phone, so that when I sit at my desk, the only thing I can do is work.
After tweeting out about my rediscovery of the Freedom app, they asked me whether they could interview me about my work habits for their blog. Since this is neither about my book nor my research, I thought it would be fun to answer their questions. Here is the full interview.
* Here is Brians’ Common Errors in English Usage, my favorite such resource, in case you have never seen it.