During the summer, I get even less work done because my kids are at home, and they’re always dropping into my home office. Luckily, I don’t check Facebook on a daily basis, and no one sends me text messages, or things would be worse.

Sure, I’ve read the advice of lifehackers and GTDers who tell you how to do the important things first and to create various systems. But I’m too weak. For a while I thought that I’d never finish my next book.

Does any of this sound familiar? If it does, I recently found two applications that have helped me. First, Freedom by Fred Stuzman. It turns off Internet access for your computer for up to eight hours. There is a way to override it—restarting your computer—but doing this is a total admission of weakness. It sells for $10, Macintosh and Windows.

One of my first visits to Silicon Valley involved attending a conference where Guy was a speaker – It is a great honor to have Guy writing about (and liking) my work.

Other recent press about Freedom includes:

• Gregory M. Lamb of the Christian Science Monitor asks: Are iPads, Smartphones and the Mobile Web Rewiring the Way We Think?
• Lifehacker has featured Freedom in a recent post on How to Deal with Distractions in a Web Worker’s World.
• Prospect Magazine talks about Freedom as a way to solve the problems Nick Carr introduces in his recent book, The Shallows.
• Filmmaker Magazine recommends Freedom: “Freedom, for Mac OS, allows you to get work down by severing your Internet connection for just a few minutes or up to eight hours.”
• Patrick Kingsley of the Guardian talks about Freedom in a provocative piece – The Art of Slow Reading. This one is definitely worth your time.
• Freedom has picked up a mention in James Sturm’s column on Slate – Life Without The Web.
• The Chronicle of Higher Education writes about Freedom and AntiSocial as two of “6 Ways to Avoid Letting Your Computer Distract You.“

I may have to start a new media section!  And don’t forget to check out the Tweets about Freedom.  Some recent favorites:

• Helping me to finish my thesis on time – http://bit.ly/L3GHW
• Seriously, the Freedom app has changed way I work; allows users to block Internet use temporarily: http://macfreedom.com/
• Shout out to http://www.macfreedom.com. I’ve been more productive in 4 hours than I’ve been in 4 weeks.

Many more like it over on the Twitter stream. So happy to know that people are getting lots done with Freedom!

This complements great press recently in the Economist and the New York Post.

There’s also been some great testimonials to Freedom popping up.

• Nicola Griffith writes “In three hours, I wrote fifteen hundred words. I think this might be the best ten dollars I’ve ever spent. “
• Jeffrey Ricker writes “I wrote more yesterday than I typically write in an entire week…also thanks to this little utility that shuts off all the chatter so readily accessible from my keyboard.“
• Olivia Fox Cabane writes “It’s been a blessing for me in terms of carving out good, solid chunks of focused work; without the possibility of temptation to go look at anything else.“
• Freedom’s patron saint Peter Sagal describes writing his new performance piece: “So: I sat down one day, turned on Freedom, and wrote a monologue in the voice of a guy who really has that job.”

There’s nothing I enjoy more than reading about the successes you all have with Freedom. In the meantime, don’t forget to check out Freedom’s new baby brother software, Anti-Social. Anti-Social turns off the social parts of the internet while allowing you to continue your online work.

For this reason, I’m very proud to announce the launch of Anti-Social (http://anti-social.cc), my new software that accomplishes just that – it blocks you from hundreds of social sites like Facebook and Twitter, but lets you access the rest of the internet. Anti-Social is just like Freedom in functionality – you give it a time period, and you need to reboot if you want to get back to the social internet.

If you’re not ready to go all the way with Freedom, check out Anti-Social. I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and I love being able to do research and listen to music streams while I work, without the worry about distractions from Facebook, Twitter, or even email! (There’s a mode that disables email!).

This is primarily a bugfix release, though Mac users will notice some improvements to the “Local Access” mode (for example, many online backups will work during Freedom).

For Windows users with managed network adapters, you’ll notice increased performance.

The biggest news with 0.5.2 is that there is now a Windows trial version! I’m happy to release something that so many of you asked for!

In other news, there’s been some great media coverage of Freedom in the past week:

• PC World and MSNBC highlighted Freedom as a way to “defeat tech distractions.”
• Over on the Huffington Post, Freedom was cited in the article “Google Isn’t (Necessarily) Making Us Stupid”
• Not main-stream media, but I like Sachin Walia’s take on Freedom: “…just saved you $15000″

Shortly after office workers found their web, e-mail, and instant-messaging capabilities disabled, reports of torrential productivity began to reach corporate offices nationwide.

“My first thought was ‘My God, this has to be some kind of mistake,’” said Prudential Insurance executive vice-president Shane Mullins of San Francisco. “My e-mail wasn’t working. Nerve.com wasn’t working. I eventually found out that the company web site wasn’t working, either. But by that time, my inbox was filling up like you wouldn’t believe.”

“My actual physical inbox,” Mullins added. “It’s this gray plastic thing on my desktop—the top of the desk I sit at.”

Kind of funny how this pretty accurately describes using Freedom. Now I’ve got to stop reading The Onion and get back to my dissertation.

Freedom for Windows is a program that locks you offline for a selected time interval – anywhere from 15 minutes to 8 hours.  Freedom keeps you offline: To circumvent it, you need to reboot your computer.  Rebooting is a hassle, so Freedom proves to a be a pretty effective way to help you concentrate and get work done.

Is Freedom something you should try? NPR’s Peter Sagal, host of “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me” has called Freedom the “Best. Software. Ever.“  Jason Snell, the editorial director of Macworld said “there may be no bigger boon to Mac productivity” than Freedom.

Freedom costs 10 dollars, and is available for immediate download. Freedom works with Windows version 7, Vista, and XP.  Here are the setup and install instructions.  If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please send them to me: fred@fredstutzman.com.

Thanks, and enjoy!

Email fred at fredstutzman.com with “Freedom for Windows” in the subject.  It might take me a few days to get back to you.

Ah, the Internet: Fountain of information, smorgasbord of entertainment, nexus of social networking. Oh, and bane to productivity.

As anyone who’s procrastinated in the past decade knows, the Internet’s vast stores of instantly accessible content are nigh irresistible…especially when you’ve got work that needs doing. A few years back, I covered Think, a utility that visually blocks out all but the current program, and there’s also WriteRoom, a full-screen word processor for focusing on your writing. But while these utilities can help hide other programs, they can’t save you from yourself. That’s where Freedom comes in.

3.5 mice.  Not bad, but I’d argue Freedom is a 4 mouse program at least!

Freedom also got a little coverage in the USA Today article Some ditch social networks to reclaim time, privacy, a front page feature.

One antidote to the always-on life is Freedom, free software that disables any Apple computer’s Internet access for up to eight hours. About 100,000 Web users have downloaded Freedom since 2008, says Fred Stutzman, a graduate student in information sciences at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the program’s creator.

“Freedom is a statement that it’s OK to push back from this tide of technology and find some space to really think,” he says.

I need to update the sidebar!

Here’s the breakdown of where the money went:

• I completed one “custom build” of Freedom for a generous donor who sent $150.00 to Médecins Sans Frontières, earmarked for Haiti Relief
• There were 20 Freedom registrations for a total of $200.00 sent to the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund (I covered the fees PayPal charges me).

All I can say is thank you!

Register/donate here.

Please register your copy of Freedom and support those in desperate need.

Is this the future of how we communicate with each other? Telling your spouse you want a divorce … on Facebook? Inflicting 25 Things That People Don’t Want to Know About You on unsuspecting friends? In exchange for the “six degrees of separation,” we may have just created a new level of navel-gazing.

But leave it to the Internet: There’s now an app that will help you save yourself from … yourself! Can’t stop yourself from tweeting, updating or blogging? “Freedom” will do it for you: The program, developed by grad student Fred Stutzman, will block your Internet access for up to eight hours.

Stutzman told The New York Times, “We’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud. I realized the only way to fight back was at an individual, personal level.”

Cool!  In other news, I am working on a version 0.5.2 of Freedom that I hope to release in the next few weeks.  It has some features that will make a number of you happy!

Link to the show (direct MP3 download)

The segment on Freedom is about 30 minutes in.  I enjoyed hearing Peggy talk about her work on the article, and her use of Freedom.

Via Academic Productivity

Peggy Orenstein writes:

And that is why I need the mast. It came in the form of an app called Freedom, which blocks your Internet access for up to eight hours at a stretch. The only way to get back online is to reboot your computer, which — though not as foolproof as, say, removing the modem entirely and overnighting it to yourself (another strategy I’ve contemplated) — is cumbersome and humiliating enough to be an effective deterrent. The program was developed by Fred Stutzman, a graduate student in information and library science, whose own failsafe self-binding technique — writing at a cafe without Internet access — came undone when the place went wireless. “We’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud,” he told me. “I realized the only way to fight back was at an individual, personal level.”

Freedom, which runs only on Macs, is downloaded more than 4,000 times a month. Stutzman says this mass-erosion of our self-control was inevitable, as the instrument of our productivity merged with that of our distraction: since computers have expanded from mere business tools to full-service entertainment centers. But I think there’s something deeper going on as well. Those mythical bird-women (look it up) didn’t seduce with beauty or carnality — not with petty diversions — but with the promise of unending knowledge. “Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens,” they crooned to passing ships, vowing that any sailor who heeded their voices would emerge a “wiser man.” That is precisely the draw of the Internet.

Thank you all supporters of Freedom!

Also – if you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m @fstutzman.  Forewarned, most of my tweets are about my research, but I will announce new releases and other Freedom-related stuff there.