Watch
Listen
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Gustave Flaubert
I was on a Trends.vc Masterminds call when the host opened with a question for the room.
“What’s the latest move you made where the payoff wildly outran what it cost you?”
Curfew was my answer, a small app I built that blocks YouTube on my laptop until 4pm.
For months I watched YouTube, at times up to 5am.
In Curfew, I set one boundary, a window that blocks YouTube outside of 4pm to 9pm. That boundary gave me back at least 15 hours a week.
The novelist Jonathan Franzen believed he couldn’t write serious fiction on a computer that could reach the internet, so he pulled the wireless card out of an old Dell laptop. That left the ethernet port.
“What you have to do is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.”
That permanently blocked internet access on his machine.
Automate the boundary and you decide once. Leave it to willpower and you decide again each day.
⛔
What are you re-deciding daily that you could automate once?
